JCURRAN%UMASS.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA (12/11/85)
It occurs to me that the rfc822 document has very good
provisions for handling machine generated mail and preventing
'loops' per se. In a server or demon, one can simply provide
the following set of fields in a out-going message:
From: Server-name@node
Sender: Person@node
Reply-to: <>
In this way, the actual origin is specified, but will never
be used as an address; all errors should be sent to the person
responsible for the server, and any attempts at replies to the
server should be disallowed since the reply-to field is null.
-- John Curran
-- Umass/AmherstPKARP@SRI-IU.ARPA (Peter Karp) (12/11/85)
I think I must be missing something in this discussion of automatically generated replies. You don't want to use a line like: Reply-To: <> to stop mailers from returning undeliverable messages. This is not the address that mailers (or programs) are supposed to use for this purpose, and in fact this address SHOULD have some value (particularly for program-generated messages) so that people receiving the messages know how to contact a person responsible for the program's behavior. In fact mailers are supposed to return undeliverable messages to the address specified in the SMTP "MAIL FROM" command. This address is normally written to a "Return-Path:" field in the header upon actual delivery in a person's mailbox. Programs which generate messages should have the brains to tell their outgoing mailer to use a null address in the "MAIL FROM" command - particularly when these programs are mailers which are in fact returning a message to its sender. I thought this is all laid out fairly clearly in 821 and 822. Peter -------
joel@gould9.UUCP (Joel West) (12/12/85)
In article <537@brl-tgr.ARPA>, JCURRAN%UMASS.BITNET@WISCVM.ARPA writes: > It occurs to me that the rfc822 document has very good > provisions for handling machine generated mail and preventing > 'loops' per se. In a server or demon, one can simply provide > the following set of fields in a out-going message: > > From: Server-name@node > Sender: Person@node > Reply-to: <> I would be inclined to use Reply-To: Postmaster or perhaps, even better, Reply-To: Postal-Complaints :-) However, some mail systems don't look at Reply-To. And, in the UUCP world (remember us, guys), this will usually not contain an explicit path, so that if the message is going very far, it will never make it back. -- Joel West (619) 457-9681 CACI, Inc. Federal, 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct., La Jolla, CA 92037 {cbosgd,ihnp4,pyramid,sdcsvax,ucla-cs}!gould9!joel gould9!joel@nosc.ARPA