i've just raised bug https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?55700
and i'm working on a fix for this for debian.
Can I just say, up front, that this just another example of why sendmail/pipe
is a TERRIBLE idea? There was a reason it was shoved into the undocumented
"spost" program in MH. But, fine .... I just had to get that off my chest.
Moving on.
1. with sendmail/pipe the headers of what we pass to the mta must make
sense for message routing, but the warning-encrusted modified draft
baked for bccfil doesn't work because it has no to: and no bcc: headers,
so the mta rejects that as unroutable. the original message that post
also submits to the mta is left with bcc intact (and
thus the mta does deliver it to the blind recipients), which duplicates
the (currently nonfunctional) warning-encrusted message.
Alright, I guess that is a bug that has been around for ... 7 years? That's
when spost was merged with post.
so, in order to make bcc: be both blind and warning-encrusted as per
the documentation we'd have to modify the original draft and nuke
its bcc: header, and add a bcc: header to the bccfil draft.
the patch that i've already attached to the bug report doesn't go that far,
it makes bcc with sendmail/pipe work like dcc elsewhere. (it also doesn't
contain any documentation updates.)
my question: is that good enough? or should we aim for bcc working exactly
the same regardless of mts?
Many electrons have been spilled about Bcc, Dcc, and nmh's use of
them. I kind of feel that nmh's Bcc is kind of dumb, but that behavior
has been around for approximately forever so I think changing that is
not a good idea. And it strikes me as a bad idea to have Bcc behave
differently depending on the MTS you are using. So I think when
stripping Bcc out of the original draft and putting it IN the Bcc draft
makes the most sense. I don't even think this is hard, because we already
do that for other MTSes (well, other than post is kind of a mess, but I
think the pieces are there).
2. the docs say dcc isn't supported for sendmail/pipe, which is ok.
however, that fact is not overly visibly documented, which is slightly bad.
Well ... where should this be documented better? I am all for improving
our documentation, it's just there is a lot of it and it could use some
organizational improvements. Really, if you have some suggestions I would
be glad to make them; I don't want to shove this on you, especially if
you are contributing a bug fix.
my question: wouldn't it be best if dcc in the sendmail/pipe case was
handled by simply replacing the header with bcc: and letting the mta do
its job? or should post with sendmail/pipe reject messages with dcc?
I firmly believe that post should reject the message immediately and nothing
should be sent.
--Ken
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