gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (12/02/86)
In article <1375@umd5>, zben@umd5 (Ben Cranston) writes: > I got some advisories back. None had any > kind of "To:" field, a field required by RFC822 and used by my software... > Date: Tue, 4 Nov 86 19:34:47 est > Subject: Warning from uucp > Apparently-To: psuvax1!UMD2.BITNET!ZBEN Apparently-To: is a joke header that was in the original Berkeley sendmail. If you run /bin/mail and give it recipients as arguments, and the message text on standard input -- the way pre-Internet unix programs, like uucp, like to do -- /bin/mail just dumps the message to sendmail, and sendmail, seeing that there is no To: line, inserts an Apparently-To: line. One of the first things I did to sendmail at Sun was to fix this to just insert a To: line. Berkeley didn't buy back the change in 4.2 (I guess they like jokes) and I don't know if their 4.3 sendmail still has it or not. Anyway, don't blame the Bitnet gateway, it's just Yet Another Sendmail-Ism. -- John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa Call +1 800 854 7179 or +1 714 540 9870 and order X3.159-198x (ANSI C) for $65. Then spend two weeks reading it and weeping. THEN send in formal comments!
kre@munnari.oz (Robert Elz) (12/05/86)
In article <1389@hoptoad.uucp>, gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: > Apparently-To: is a joke header I agree with this - adding this header doesn't correct the problem with the original headers, there is still no proper destination header, so there doesn't seem to be a lot of point adding it (its only done if the headers aren't rfc822 compliant, because of having no destination) > One of the first things I did to sendmail at Sun > was to fix this to just insert a To: line. This is OK if the mail originated at your site, but otherwise this certainly isn't the way to fix it. This makes it impossible to tell that the To: line wasn't there all the time, which is why Eric chose Apparently-To - to make that obvious. There's no way a mailer somewhere down the path can insert a "To:" header that is accurate - in most cases its likely to omit recipients, but it may also include some who should have been in a bcc: header, and so not shown at all. (Apparently-To has this defect as well). Given that the desire is to make the headers legal rfc822, my suggestion is to add a header like bcc: (adressees unknown) This satisfies rfc822 (bcc is one of the allowable destination headers, and it need not carry any address information on it, unllike the others) while not pretending to state any facts that can't possibly be guaranteed. Robert Elz kre@munnari.oz
eric@blia.BLI.COM (Eric Allman) (12/10/86)
Initially, sendmail did insert To: lines instead of Apparently-To: lines, and I got flamed at from 30 directions. The main problem is that the recipient list at any site other than the originating site only has a subset of the address list. People felt this was misleading. Apparently-To: was a compromise; I don't care much for it either. eric