On 22 Jan 2004, at 05:00, Rabinowitz, Ari (Exchange) wrote:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Brendan Pratt Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 11:49 PM
What is wrong with the mailman authors making their product superior enough to compensate for Microdummies poor programing and faulty RFC interpretation?
Absolutely nothing, but note that Outlook is not RFC non-compliant on this issue; what is displayed on the applications GUI is not covered by an RFC and is a matter between the developer, their conscience, and the end user.
Mailman is doing the right thing, by specifying the Sender address as the list bounce address so that bounces go there, and the From: address as the author of the message. Unfortunately, Microsoft in its latest versions of Outlook has decided to show both the Sender: and the From:
I am yet to be convinced that Outlook is conflating From: and Sender: headers. I suspect it may be conflating the From: and Return-Path: content but no matter; the observation about why is spot on.
addresses in the From: field so that it is easier to notice spam with
forged From: headers. The two desires, to have bounces go to a different
address than replies and to display both the Sender address and the
From: address conflict.
There is no way for the Mailman developers to fix this, since if they didn't have the Sender address be the list bounce address then all of Mailman's bounce handling would no longer work, and the author of the message would get flooded with bounces that they don't care about and cant do anything about.
The fix would have to be for Outlook to have an option to not display the
Sender address in some cases, which is a fix that Microsoft would have to do.
Sorry, but this isn't something that the Mailman developers can do anything about.
Ari
In principle I agree with this conclusion but in practice I think it may be possible to offset the problem highlighted in the original post.
The post that started this thread said that Outlook is displaying something like this in the "From" field of its GUI:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On behalf of <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I suspect that what confuses/upsets/deters/induces-fear-in some Outlook users is the appearance of the string "bounces" in what is displayed; bouncing may have connotations for Outlook users which are not apparent to ordinary people and hence their concerns.
But suppose that what they saw displayed was instead:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On behalf of <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
That is to suppose that Mailman used an alias listname-sender (or some such) instead of listname-bounces as the return path for its bounce handling. After all, MM 2.0 used listname-admin and I do not remember this causing such angst as listname-bounces has since MM 2.1 arrived.
Would this defuse the objections being registered by Outlook users?
If so, then what I said to Jon Stethridge in a private communication, before he set this thread running, applies:
<quote> ...
The best that might be otherwise be achievable would be a change in the alias used as the envelope sender from <listname>-bounces to something more palatable when it is displayed by Outlook. This would require a thorough trawl of the Mailman code to make sure this change did not lead to any undesirable side-effects.
Thus far nobody has volunteered for the task and, without a confirmation from Mailman's owner Barry Warsaw that he will fold it into the Mailman source tree, I doubt anyone is likely to commit the time and effort to implement and test the solution; there is also the issue of upgrading existing installations and the acceptability of that task to the site admins.
</quote>
If this list's membership forged a consensus behind a manageable and relatively minor proposal to change Mailman, which did not compromise its adherence to RFCs, then maybe there is a way forward to suit most people.
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Barrett http://www.openinfo.co.uk
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