So I've been wading in the waters of the nmh address encoding routines as
part of the RFC 2047 encoding work, and I've come across something that
is puzzling me.
For those of you that don't spend too much time looking at RFC 822/2822/5322,
email headers have what is known as "group" support. Specifically, you
can do something like this:
To: groupname: a, b, c;
Now the RFCs are a bit vague on what this means. RFC 5322, Section 3.4 says
in part:
When it is desirable to treat several mailboxes as a single unit
(i.e., in a distribution list), the group construct can be used. The
group construct allows the sender to indicate a named group of
recipients.
Ok, fine. I've never seen a MUA actually treat those as a single unit,
and I don't even know what that would mean from a MUA's perspective. But
the paragraph goes on to say:
When it is desirable to treat several mailboxes as a single unit
(i.e., in a distribution list), the group construct can be used. The
group construct allows the sender to indicate a named group of
recipients.
This is probably what people are familiar with, e.g.:
To: undisclosed recipients:;
The way nmh deals with this is to handle the second case. Specifically,
if you provide something like this:
To: list: a, b, c;
When post runs the email will be _sent_ to a, b, and c, but the headers will
look like this:
To: list:;
This all assumes you're not one of those misguided individuals who uses
spost or sendmail/pipe :-)
So I guess my questions are:
- Any of the greybeards here want to expand on the original thinking behind
group addresses?
- Should we leave the current behavior? It's been this way forever and I
think it's the most useful behavior for dealing with groups, but I just
want to be sure everyone is on the same page. It doesn't seem to be
documented anywhere (but it is mentioned in the MH book).
--Ken
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