Hi Jerrold,
On 14 Apr 2004 at 10:52, Weinger, Jerrold (DSCP) spoke, thus:
> What is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The return envelope address for the BrailleNote list, which was supplied
to each receiving system as the actual sender's address during the SMTP
transaction. It shows in the Return-Path field in any message. This is
the address intended for use by mail delivery agents to report delivery
problems to senders (see RFC 2821). It probably redirects to some poor
unsuspecting sod somewhere, though these days varies with subscriber and
redirects to a robot which will oust you of your subscription, or at least
warn you about the fact that the list can't reach you any longer. As you
know, when you first subscribed, it was necessary to verify your existence
by sending a mail back to the subscribing address. The list must always
be able to reach you at any given moment. Some very large lists even do
automatic monthly probes - they send out mail, and if it should bounce,
then the address is no longer deliverable. Addresses which are invalid
are obviously not healthy, either morally to the list owner or the mail
delivery system, which continuously pushes out mail, possibly until it
fails some days later, which is obviously performance-degrading.
This particular mailing list uses the bounces address as Return-Path, as
the Sender and as the errors address. Of these, the first two fields are
formalised by RFC2821 and RFC2822. In other words, if your user agent
(email program) should receive the message, you should not, under normal
circumstances, need to see it. The From field should be used to show who
originated the message (that is, the person or persons who typed the
message out on their terminal), which it does (RFC2822, section 3.6.2).
The Reply-To field - well, we've already had this little lecture before,
I'm sure.
What you are seeing is the difference in the way email programs handle
quoted replies. In the first case, the From field was used to construct
the original sender's identity, which is accurate in this case. In the
second case, an email program noticed that the name and email address did
not match in both the From and Sender fields. Since the Sender field is
meant to represent the entity who put your message into the delivery
process (see RFC2822 section 3.6.2 again), the idea is that the email
program should note the fact that the reply was sourced from that entity,
i.e. the mailing list, and not the original author of the mail for whom it
is delivering. It therefore makes the comment "From sender X on behalf of
Y".
Without getting even deeper into philosophical and design considerations
of email, going even further off-topic than I already am (shhhh!), we'll
stop there. I only advise you to read the indicated RFCs if you want very
specific understanding of how this works, or to write me off list about it
with further questions.
Cheers,
Sabahattin
--
Thought for the day:
The only thing that hurts more than paying income tax
is not having to pay income tax.
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