On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, David Woodhouse wrote:
We should not abuse the Resent-From: header. Instead, we should either
introduce a new header or simply add a new field to the Received:
header. I favour the latter.
The received header unfortunetly has not been standartized (ok to be
more precise it standartized by RFC2821 in section 4.4 but many systems
still don't do it in correct way).
Additionally Received header are specially designated to be trace fields,
so they are like a loggin info. Normally in programming, one would not think
of using loggin data to implement program processing (other then database
logs where it is a journal that can be used to revert back to original
state or in case of filesystems, like ext3 JFS to fix the original
state in case of known errors). So in my view Received header is a bad
place for adding this data.
Plus to that Received header is normally added by systems when it received
the message but Submitter information is added when message is being sent out.
I have not seen any reason given for abusing the existing Resent-From:
header, nor do I understand why it is useful to do so instead of
introducing something new and unambiguous.
I completely agree. I'll be submitting proposal later this week on it.
In the mean time I'll present the main ideas in separate email to
get a view if WG has any interest in it and to try to resolve some
of the issues I have not decided on.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net