Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!adm!slevy@uc.msc.umn.edu
From: slevy@uc.msc.umn.edu (Stuart Levy)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re:  A plea for sanity
Message-ID: <11800@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: 14 Feb 88 08:28:33 GMT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 18

(In reply to Rob Austein's message <SRA.12374181810.BABYL@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU>)

I don't think it's fair to call a mailer "broken" because it retains the
address of the original sender for reply purposes.  If mailing-list
redistributions eradicated the original From: line, replacing the original
sender's address with that of the redistributor, their mailing lists would be
far less useful.  Ditto if our mailers replied according to the SMTP envelope
rather than the body of the message.  Note that the envelope's format is
not specified by RFC 822, only the message header is -- and messages can
be delivered by other means besides SMTP.

Though RFC 822 doesn't define it, I've seen some mailing lists distribute
messages with an Errors-To: line.  This seems to be just what's needed
to separate message replies from delivery error replies.

Sendmail seems to support "Errors-To"; how many other mailers do?

	Stuart Levy, Minn. Supercomputer Center