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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Apparently-To: and msgs with no To: header
Message-ID: <1389@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Tue, 2-Dec-86 06:42:25 EST
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1389
Posted: Tue Dec  2 06:42:25 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 2-Dec-86 10:06:24 EST
References: <606@mtunf.UUCP> <2338@psuvax1.UUCP> <1375@umd5>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 22

In article <1375@umd5>, zben@umd5 (Ben Cranston) writes:
>                                I got some advisories back.  None had any 
> kind of "To:" field, a field required by RFC822 and used by my software...
> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 86 19:34:47 est
> Subject: Warning from uucp
> Apparently-To: psuvax1!UMD2.BITNET!ZBEN

Apparently-To: is a joke header that was in the original Berkeley
sendmail.  If you run /bin/mail and give it recipients as arguments,
and the message text on standard input -- the way pre-Internet unix
programs, like uucp, like to do -- /bin/mail just dumps the message to
sendmail, and sendmail, seeing that there is no To: line, inserts an
Apparently-To: line.  One of the first things I did to sendmail at Sun
was to fix this to just insert a To: line.  Berkeley didn't buy back
the change in 4.2 (I guess they like jokes) and I don't know if their
4.3 sendmail still has it or not.

Anyway, don't blame the Bitnet gateway, it's just Yet Another Sendmail-Ism.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65.
Then spend two weeks reading it and weeping.  THEN send in formal comments!