MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA (Mark Crispin) (08/21/84)
The main objection I have to the idea of popping you into an
editor to compose the message and then parsing the header to see
where the message goes to is that there is not necessarily a
correspondence between the header of a message and its envelope!
Just about every mail system (including TOPS-20's MM) I am aware
of which has this capability has this fundamental flaw.
The problem is what you do about things which do not conform
to the definition of 822 but are still valid under it. The best
example I can think of is the tradition of using group names to
hide a recipient list (this is the original usage of group names
from long long ago and, I imagine, still its primary usage).
bcc's present another problem; there are several theories on the
correct bcc behavior which can only be determined at mailer
instead of editor level.
-------ALPERN@SJRLVM4.BITNET (David Alpern) (08/22/84)
Both the problem of BCCs and of recipient lists can be dealt
with reasonably by having the "header template" creator include
all of the addressees (all members of the group, all BCC entries)
in the header as seen within the editor, and then "hiding" the
appropriate entries as the header is parsed to create the envelope.
The only difficulty is how to separate those groups whose members
the user wants seen from those whose recipient list is to be hidden.
Our choice was to hide all group recipient lists, since people did
not seem to be using any group names in situations where the recipient
list was wanted. Another possibility would be a syntactic distinction
(e.g. a * instead of a : after the group name) between the two uses.
The only problem this seems to leave is that the user might edit a
group recipient list which gets hidden, yielding misleading information
about who the recipients were. Since group names really have no
semantic meaning from a recipient's viewpoint anyhow, this seems mute.
Is there a side to this problem I've missed?
- Dave
David Alpern
IBM San Jose Research Laboratory, K65/282
5600 Cottle Road, San Jose, CA 95193
Phone: (408) 284-6521
Internet: Alpern%IBM-SJ@CSnet-Relay.ARPA
Alpern@SJRLVM4.BITNET