On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 09:10 -0500, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: > it's an empty group. it's syntactically meaningless. it's like extra > whitespace between addresses... it's not needed.
It is not syntactically meaningless. It is precisely described by the syntax. I suspect what you mean is that it is _semantically_ meaningless, and then you are only partially correct, since the semantics are dependent on context. In the context of the MUA looking at the headers and deciding which SMTP RCPT TO: commands to issue, it is indeed semantically meaningless. But these are user-supplied, user-visible headers, and RFC2822 specifically documents their use for conveying information other than just the list of SMTP recipients' addresses. The MUA has no business deciding that what I have typed for the benefit of my recipients is semantically meaningless, and stripping it from my mail. Likewise, if someone types such information into a mail which is sent to me, my MUA has no business hiding that information from me. The display-name of the group, even a group with no addresses, is just like the display-name which indicates that [EMAIL PROTECTED] is actually named Jeffrey Stedfast. Semantically meaningless when working out how to send the mail, but definitely not semantically meaningless to the _user_. Would you advocate that Evolution should strip those too, as I've done above? Think about usability. It's not sane to render everything in 'canonical' form according to how an MUA would actually interpret RFC2822. There's real person-to-person communication in there which you lose. Abide by the principle of minimal munging, for your users' sake. The same goes for the X-Spam-Report: headers which I posted an example of. It's the same problem -- just because you show something which is different only in whitespace or comments, that doesn't make it right. You've lost or obscured information, needlessly. It's still wrong. -- dwmw2 _______________________________________________ evolution-hackers maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
