At 16:14 -0400 on 04/15/2012, Robert A. Rosenberg wrote about Re:
"proper" handling of BCC:
At 10:04 -0500 on 03/01/2012, Hector Santos wrote about Re: "proper"
handling of BCC:
There is also the consideration regarding displaying. The MUA may
want to inform the BCC recipient to the privacy nature of the
message:
NOTE: THIS IS A BLIND COPY TO YOU. THE OTHER RECIPIENTS LISTED IN THE
TO/CC DISTRIBUTION ARE NOT AWARE OF YOUR RECEPTION OF THIS MESSAGE.
Query - For issuing this message, how do you determine that the
recipient is getting a copy of the message without being listed in a
To or Cc header due to being BCC'ed or being subscribed to a mailing
list (or do you treat a mailing list received copy as a BCC'ed copy)?
I ignore the case of being listed in a To or Cc as a suppressed
address (ie: Group-Name:add1, add2, etc. ;) since the existence of a
group-name:; comment implies a hidden BCC list.
I asked this question over a month ago and there were a number of
replies which branched off from my query but did not answer it (due
to misunderstanding my question or shoving the support onto the MSA).
Thus I will ask it and try to be more explicit in what I want to understand.
The situation is that I have just received a normal message with NO
explicit indication that I was BCC'ed in the message body or via a
header. IOW: I am not listed in the supplied TO or CC header
(although I may be listed in a Received For clause if I am the only
recipient in my domain).
This BCC delivery would be due to being listed in the BCC header by
the sender, being listed in a Group-name:address-1, address-2,etc.;
address in the To or Cc header (shown in the received message as
Group-name:;), or being sent the message by a mailing list. As I
state, I will ignore the mailing list delivery as non-BCC (assuming
that there is a List-ID header to flag this) and ask ONLY about the
other two which are true cases of being BCC'ed.
With that out of the way, I am reading a received message and want my
MUA to warn me that replying will expose to whoever I reply to via
Reply-To-All (ie: The To,Cc,From/Sender addresses) that I received a
copy (even though not listed as To or Cc). Note that this is a
warning that the MUA sends me when I try to queue/send the reply.
My question is how would it decide that I should be warned in lieu of
the message actually getting queued/sent. I will assume a
sanity-check that the warning should NOT be raised if the message
being replied to has a List-ID header (ie: It is OK to reply to
mailing list messages since if you only want to lurk/monitor you
should be cognizant of the fact the message came from a mailing list
and it is your fault for responding if you do not want to indicate
you are subscribed). Thus we are talking about only true BCC'ed
messages. The only way I can see for the MUA to detect this is to
look for me in the To and Cc headers and not finding me there (and
not finding a List-ID) to issue the warning.