Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:2957 news.sysadmin:2239 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@tinman.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.sysadmin Subject: Re: mail headers Message-ID: Date: 4 Apr 89 15:38:58 GMT References: <5463@ozdaltx.UUCP> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Followup-To: comp.mail.uucp Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 58 In-reply-to: root@ozdaltx.UUCP's message of 31 Mar 89 23:01:02 GMT 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 don't want to see that sort of stuff on your screen, put something like the following in your ~/.mailrc: ignore address classification content-length email-version ignore end-of-header end-of-protocol errors-to in-reply-to lines ignore message-id message-version path phone posted-date precedence ignore priority received references reply-to resent-date resent-from ignore resent-message-id resent-sender resent-to return-message-id ignore return-path security send-requests-to send-submissions-to ignore sender status type ua-message-id x-mailer x-postmark Does anyone really care what system received the message, that systems ID number and a time stamp to boot? Yes! `Received' is one of RFC822's (optional) trace fields: 4.3.2. RECEIVED A copy of this field is added by each transport service that relays the message. The information in the field can be quite useful for tracing transport problems. You're welcome not to add the trace fields to mail as it passes through your machine, but it's much more polite to add them. It's a way of accepting blame/credit for what you may have done to the message as you passed it along. Other mail administrators will thank you, and users are always able to ignore it. I can tell what sites the message went through by looking at the path line plus I can read the date the message was sent and I know when I received it. If you mean "Path:", then you're talking about a news article, not a mail message. If you mean "Return-Path:", then you're welcome to reconfigure your system's mail deliverer so as not to include it - it's an optional field added by the final transport system. But Return-Path: isn't an audit trail, only a suggestion of how you might attempt to get back if you can't use From: and there's no Reply-To:. Not to mention the bytes saved in transmission by eliminating all this garbage. What can be done???? If you don't want to transport all those headers, then you're welcome to establish a new standard by which you will exchange mail with your neighbors. You'll probably need to write a gateway for them to run on their machines, so that you can continue to receive mail from the rest of the world. If you come up with something that works, suggest it on comp.mail.headers and/or write an RFC about it. The world will thank you! And if you don't like the verbosity of RFC822's headers, just wait 'till you see X.400 :-)