Stephen R. van den Berg writes on 29 July 1996 at 08:01:05
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.
I understand these concerns; however RFC822 specificaly allows for
multiple recipients in a Reply-To: header. Given that, it seems that
there should be a stright-forward way to deal with this in formail;
even worse is that "formail" silently ignores multiple Reply-To:
addresses.
For (a), wouldn't the Reply-To: (or Resent-Reply-To:) header supersede
all other addresses and thus greatly simplify the searching? For (b),
how about only using multiple (Resent-)Reply-To: addresses if
formail's "-t" option is also specified? Or if you are really worried
about mail-storms and existing recipes, a new formail option.
Dan
------------------- message is author's opinion only ------------------
J. Daniel Smith <DanS(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com> http://www.bristol.com/~dan
Bristol Technology B.V. +31 33 450 50 50, ...51 (FAX)
Amersfoort, the Netherlands {info,jobs}(_at_)bristol(_dot_)com