Jim Lyon wrote:
[2822 interpretation of Resent-*]
This sense of "forwarding" is normally activated by a user
pressing a "Forward" button in a UI (or similar action.) I
completely agree that "Resent-From" has no place in this
sense of forwarding.
That covers MIME types like message/rfc822, multipart/digest,
or maybe the proposed application/mbox, where original mails
are "forwarded" as part of the body, as complete as possible.
It's not exactly the sense of "forward" in Outlook, which is
IMHO no "forward" at all. And that might be the explanation
for the Resent-* headers:
These headers already existed before MIME, in RfC 822. So my
guess is that they were used in situations where today anybody
(minus Outlook and pre-MIME MUAs) uses message/rfc822:
[Std 11, 4.7]
| Some systems permit mail recipients to forward a message,
| retaining the original headers, by adding some new fields.
| This standard supports such a service, through the "Resent-"
| prefix to field names.
| Whenever the string "Resent-" begins a field name, the field
| has the same semantics as a field whose name does not have
| the prefix. However, the message is assumed to have been
| forwarded by an original recipient who attached the
| "Resent-" field. This new field is treated as being more
| recent than the equivalent, original field. For
| example, the "Resent-From", indicates the person that
| forwarded the message, whereas the "From" field indicates the
| original author.
It would probably be a good idea for Pete Resnick (editor of
RFC 2822) to chime in on this interpretation.
Maybe it's just a case of RfC 2822 trying to fix something in
Std 11, and the result is not always clearer than the original
text. We have the author of RfC 822 here, he won't let us
stray too far away from the real meaning of Resent-* headers.
Bye, Frank