Murray S. Kucherawy writes:
> The question to me is whether the message that the MLM software emits is
> the same as the original message. If it is, then the Author ought to be
> preserved across the MLM. If it is not, then the MLM emits a new message,
> and it actually SHOULD NOT keep the Author the same, as described above.
> So we get to argue about "same", and of course the specs aren't
> particularly rigorous about this.
>
> RFC5598's definitions, in Section 5.3 (and indirectly 5.2) say that it
> doesn't change From, from which I infer it doesn't change Author, although
> it does say it's a "new" message that's emitted. That document is not a
> proposed standard and merely documents current use (as I understand it), so
> it's merely recording the fact that MLMs technically violate the SHOULD NOT.
AFAICS the "new message" referred to there is from the point of view
of the SMTP protocol, not the higher level of RFC 5322. In
particular, RFC 5322 says that it the message is a "new message" at
this level, Message-Id should change too. That would clearly screw up
list traffic processing for many users.
RFC 5598 itself says:
In addition to sending the new message to a potentially large
number of new Recipients, the Mailing List can modify content, for
example, by deleting attachments, converting the format, and adding
list-specific comments. Mailing Lists also archive messages
posted by Authors. Still the message retains characteristics of
being from the original Author.
In particular,
RFC5322.From: Set by - original Author
Names and email addresses for the original Author of the
message content are retained.
> > So it seems to me the points of contention here are:
>
> 1) Is the MLM violation of the SHOULD NOT cited above the kind of violation
> that we accept based on how "SHOULD NOT" is defined in RFC2119?
It's not a violation IMO. See below.
> 2) Is the MLM emitting a new message? I would agree with Michael
See the discussion in RFC 5322 about when a new Message-Id should be
assigned. Specifically, from sec. 3.6.4:
In all cases, it is the meaning that the sender of the message
wishes to convey (i.e., whether this is the same message or a
different message) that determines whether or not the
"Message-ID:" field changes, not any particular syntactic
difference that appears (or does not appear) in the message.
Here, sender refers to the MLM, and in most cases (not all!) the MLM
intends that the distributed message be considered the same as the
received message. Further more, human recipients rarely have any
trouble distinguishing the MLM decorations and extracting the original
message. MLMs which delete MIME parts and translate HTML to plain
text are another matter, but even there I believe that both senders
and recipients agree that it is the "same message". If (human) sender
and recipient agree on this, I see *zero space* for the interpretation
that it's a new message, unless you deprecate RFC 5322 at the same time.
As I wrote elsewhere, the only people who ever claim that list
messages as distributed are new messages in the sense of RFC 5322,
sec. 3.6.4, are non-participants in almost all of the mailing lists on
which they want to impose this interpretation.
> and contend that it is if there have been any content changes at
> all, in the same way that someone making a compilation of a series
> of independent works (a "mix tape") owns the copyright on the mix,
> though not on the original material. Now, MLMs do that with
> digests already -- who else could one legitimately put in the From
> of a digest? -- but typically not for resent messages.
As long as you mention copyright, it's likely that the material
typically appended by MLMs is not copyrightable, it's mostly
determined by the MLM's interface (eg, unsubscription and archive
URLs), and the rest is hardly an original work of expression. So the
copyright analogy says there is no ground for claiming the MLM is an
author. Not even in the case of deletion or transformation of MIME
parts -- when automated, these are also not "expressive works".
> Might it be sufficient to declare an "Original-Message-ID" or
> "Author-Message-ID" or "List-Original-Message-ID" field that
> contains the author-generated Message-ID, allowing for the
> duplicate suppression that's done now?
It's not just duplicate suppression, it's also threading, because some
people have mixed sources for messages in the thread.
That screws all existing MUAs in processing dupes and threading
messages when some are received via and some off- list. Even once
they are taught recognize Original-Message-ID, the threading algorithm
will become *much* more complex.
Somebody, perhaps this WG or more likely an appropriate WG with input
from us, just needs to decide this issue one way or the other. If
it's decided that MLM decorations create "new messages", and that
therefore MLMs must provide new From and Message-ID values, I suspect
we can expect widespread violation from existing lists indefinitely.
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