Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!mailrus!ames!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!dheller
From: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Mail on sunOS 4.0
Message-ID: <4442@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 13 Jul 88 05:56:57 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Reply-To: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 46


I just heard some very disturbing news about Mail on sunos 4.0.
Apparently, messages no longer have the string:

	From <path> <date-recieved>

at the beginning of each message.  Instead, the string looks like:

	From <your-login-name>

I see some major problems with this new format.
	1) It's incompatible with any other mailer to date so
	   now all mail user agents will no longer work until
	   they are fixed.  This includes MH, gnuemacs, elm, mush,
	   and, of course, the old version of Mail.

	2) The "path" that was there, was always correct -- you
	   could always use that to get the return path easily
	   if it was incorrect in unavailable in other headers.

	3) The date that came after the path was the date that
	   you received the message.  This is rarely the same as
	   the date the message was sent (via the Date: header).
	   This isn't as important as the previous two reasons,
	   but it's a shame that such information is now lost.
	   I, personally, consider this unforunate because in my
	   mailer (Mush), you can sort messages by date sent or
	   date recieved as well as doing other neat things with
	   the date of a message.

The question is obvious: why?!
Well, clearly, someone at sun was thinking, "well, we have this problem
which can easily be solved by making the header look like _this_!"
Obviously, this person didn't really think about the impact of 1 and 2
mentioned above.  I would still like to know what the motivating reason
was to change this format.  Of course, I don't know all the facts here --
maybe they compensated for the change by adding new headers into the
list of headers which contain the real return path and the date received.

More importantly, can this "feature" be _disabled_?
Is it a function of sendmail? binmail, or something even newer?
Can I configure out this feature using my sendmail.cf?

Does anyone in the know offer more information on this?  I'm happy
to carry on religious arguments about Mail folder formats as well. :-)
Dan Heller	<island!argv@sun.com>