J. Daniel Smith <DanS(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com> wrote:
David W. Tamkin writes on 27 July 1996 at 18:48:54
It requires a lot of processes and gives meaningless results, because formail
-r extracts only one return address, even when the Resent-Reply-To: or
Reply-To: header contains more than one (and Stephen has told me he plans to
leave it that way). So unless there is also a non-empty Cc: header, it will
Ah! This explains why my loopback.rc recipe didn't work as I
expected the other day. I'm sure Stephen has a good reason for this,
maybe he has the time to explain it?
Well, two (or three) things, actually:
1. The -r reply generator of formail will probably never support multiple
addresses because:
a. Looking for the best address to reply to is a completely different
algorithm than looking for the best group of addresses to reply to.
Finding a *group* of addresses involves actually determining that
you even are searching for a group and not only for one address.
Then finding out the best address for each. It's already a tricky
business doing this just for one address.
b. It makes thousands of autoreply recipes vulnerable to mail-storm
attacks. Formail tries its best to control the damage even if
operated by someone who doesn't know what he is doing. If it were
to reply to multiple addresses at times, this damage control is
severely undermined.
2. What Alan Stebbens described, reformatting addresses for easy extraction,
might not be so difficult to implement since that doesn't imply picking
addresses for an autoreply function, it just gives lists of addresses.
--
Sincerely,
srb(_at_)cuci(_dot_)nl
Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).
Father's Day Special at the local clinic -- Vasectomy!