Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!lll-tis!cblpf.ATT.COM!mark
From: mark@cblpf.ATT.COM (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: Fw: Away-service Away-service
Message-ID: <8805201523.AA20956@cblpf.ATT.COM>
Date: 20 May 88 19:23:38 GMT
Sender: root@tis.llnl.gov
Distribution: inet
Organization: The Internet
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Approved: post-x400@tis.llnl.gov


	Maybe I am missing something, but if a message is getting delivered to
	a given account, then either the account name and the name of the local
	machine appear somewhere in the headers or they don't.  If they do then
	you don't send an "away service" message, otherwise you do.
	
	If you have many accounts which redistribute received mail to a central
	one, there still is no problem if the redistribution CORRECTLY includes
	the redistributed address.  Notice I said redistribute, not forward.
	You, of course, know the distinction.

It could be that I just misunderstand the distinction.  To me, "redistribute"
is something you do to a mailing list, and "forward" is something you do
for an individual.  If you're saying that redistribution implies expanding
all the names in the header, then I don't follow you at all.  It seems the
other way around to me.

So I'll assume you're saying that mailing lists should keep the name
of the list in the header, while personal forwarding (including things
like postmaster@somewhere) get rewritten with the new name.

The problem is that all the forwarding software I'm familiar with does
not rewrite the headers to take the expansion in to account.  In fact,
forwarding and mailing lists are done with the same mechanism, forwarding
is just a mailing list with only 1 (sometimes 2 or 3) names on it.

Even if it did rewrite it, it's quite common to use a local route in
a forwarding address:
	Forward to cblpf!mark
is on several machines.  So checking for my own name is nontrivial.
(Also, there's no way to update every machine to rewrite headers,
lots of those machines out there run software that doesn't even know
what a header is!  Rewriting is hard and dangerous.)

	Mark