Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:2939 news.sysadmin:2229
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: mail headers
Message-ID: <3734@phri.UUCP>
Date: 1 Apr 89 16:04:26 GMT
References: <5463@ozdaltx.UUCP>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 36

In article <5463@ozdaltx.UUCP> root@ozdaltx.UUCP (root) writes:
> Wouldn't it be wonderful to receive e-mail WITHOUT scads of notations of
> 'Received by:' at the beginning of each message?

	If you are talking about you, as the reader, not having to see all
those lines, you're (probably) in luck.  Most MUAs (Mail User Agent, i.e.
the program you use to read your mail) have some way to surpress the
display of header lines you don't want to see.  In BSD mail and Sun's
mailtool, you can put "ignore received-by" in your .mailrc file.  The
details may differ for other MUAs but there is probably something similar.
Ask your local mail guru.

> Does anyone really care what system received the message, that systems ID
> number and a time stamp to boot?

	I do, but that's because I'm postmaster here.  Most of the "just
plain folks" around here probably don't even know that they exist, nor care
about the information contained in them.  My concern is not that 100 bytes
get added to each message at each intermediate site, but that not every
site bothers to put that information in as it relays the mail.  Sometimes
the Recieved-by: header is the only way I can figure out where mail came
from.  By the time a piece of mail has been mishandled by several uucp,
bitnet, internet, csnet, etc. gateways, the From: line is often such a mess
as to be totally unintelligible.

> I can tell what sites the message went through by looking at the path line

	Path lines only pertain to news, not to mail, and even then it is
not guaranteed that if you reverse a news path line you will get a valid
mail route.  There are unidirectional links and there are news links which
don't provide mail service.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"