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Re: [Nmh-workers] Changes to forw(1)

2016-10-14 09:33:01
Ken wrote:

- Traceability - I mean, why is this an issue?  Who would really care?

I count four people who have responded that they do.  I might have miscounted,
but obviously some do care.

I'm not saying that no one cares ... but I'm not sure I agree with the
count there.

As I read it, you and Lyndon are on the "Nmh-" prefix side,
unambiguously.  Me, Paul, and Oliver are unambiguously on the "no
prefix" side.  In terms of everyone else who has commented on this
thread ... I admit I am not clear where Ralph stands on this particular
issue; perhaps the Marmite shortage is affecting things :-) Ralph's
not so crazy on letting those headers get out, but he never said that
he wanted or didn't want a Nmh- prefix.  Mark Begman did say that
traceability was good, so I could see putting him in the Nmh- prefix
camp (I would personally describe his position as "no objections",
but he can correct me if he wants). Valdis only commented on the
X-Mailer/User-Agent issue, and Robert's response did not really mention
a preference either.  So, it's a bit of a wash there.

Also, copying other art ... the few MUAs
that do stuff similar to this (mutt is the prime example I could find)
use headers for this purpose without any special prefix, and

And messages used to have a couple of handfuls of header lines.  Now
they're 3 to 4 (of my) screenfulls, and some have names like X-AOL-IP,
X-Pobox-Relay-ID, X-MS-Has-Attach,
x-ms-office365-filtering-correlation-id,
X-MS-Exchange-Transport-CrossTenantHeadersStamped,
x-forefront-antispam-report, X-GMAIL-LABELS, X-GMAIL-THRID, and
X-GMAIL-MSGID.  So I don't buy your point about prior art.  At all.

Well, I was thinking more about the the particular thing _nmh_ does, in
terms of having a user or another program insert a header for another
part of the MUA to interpret and remove before sending.  I believe, looking
at those headers, those are inserted by MTAs, and they are intended to
be sent.

and no one seems to care.

I care.  And others have indicated that they care.

Fair enough; I guess I didn't mean "there were zero people who cared",
but more, "There was no general outrage across the Interwebs".

As long as we're beating this into the ground, I wanted to bring
up something else.  In another message you said:

The status quo supports both:  Nmh-Attach: is used by the code, and if
someone wants to use Attach:, they can.

I realized that change went in post-1.6, so that's not completely accurate
in terms of released code.

Also ... if we are having post(8) scrub out headers with an Nmh- prefix,
we could also have it scrub out any header, like Attach:, and we could
have it put in a X-Mailer or User-Agent header.  It looks like that
was never standardized for Email, but it comes from HTTP and there was
an Internet-Draft here to use it for Email:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-melnikov-email-user-agent-00

So if traceability is the major concern, would a User-Agent header
address everyone's issues?

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