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From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.mail,net.bugs.uucp
Subject: Re: sendmail configuration notes
Message-ID: <275@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Sep-84 10:41:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.275
Posted: Fri Sep  7 10:41:43 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Sep-84 06:19:59 EDT
References: <1015@princeton.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 32

While Peter makes some good suggestions for things that are reasonably
local configuration options, I must point out that Date and From are
required by RFC822, and Message-ID and Received are strongly recommended.
Thus, if you make the changes to remove these lines, you will break
your conformance to the mail standard.

I am not convinced that these headers really make any difference in the
disk space occupied by mail or the time to transmit mail over phone lines.
The numbers that really matter for mail are the number of messages, not
the number of bytes in the messages.  (Of course, a 50K file will make
a difference, but most mail messages are quite short.)  Saving 100-200
bytes on a message cuts down transmission time by about one second per
message at 1200 baud.  Considering the time to negotiate the transmission
of each message file, this second is insignificant.

Now, consider the benefit of the lines.  In addition to conformance with
the standard (which the UUCP project has adopted as a UUCP network standard),
these lines provide an audit trail, so that when you find a strange
message dropped on the floor and can't figure out what happened, these
lines make it much clearer what happened, so you can deliver the message
and/or track down the problem.  We all know how reliable UUCP mail is and
how often this kind of situation arises - it seems well worth an extra
10 cent charge on 10% of your phone calls.

The real reason people object to the verbose 822 headers is that they,
as humans, don't like to read them (or watch them fill up their screen
at 1200 baud.)  This is easily handled by instructing your user interface
not to display lines you don't like.  I have the line
	ignore received status via message-id date sent-by
in my .mailrc for exactly this purpose.

	Mark Horton