Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!elbereth.rutgers.edu!hardees.rutgers.edu!patterso
From: patterso@hardees.rutgers.edu (Ross Patterson)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: re: Batch Processing -- via SMTP....
Message-ID: 
Date: 26 Sep 88 02:04:43 GMT
References: <8809250137.AA00317@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 19

Craig,

   The experience of the BITNET "LISTSERV" mail manager bears out your
observations from the Info server. Many's the time we've wished for an
explicitly defined address to direct errors towards, rather than
relying on the mail system's implementors to grasp the vagueries of
RFC822's From: and Sender:; RFC821's MAIL FROM:, and the interaction
between them all. We've even found some mailers that use Reply-to: as
an error target! LISTSERV has the unenviable status of both a mail
originator (for the discussion groups it manages), and a batch processor
(for the various commands it accepts (subscription requests, file
retrievals, database search, etc.), causing it even further grief. 

One mail-based batch processor I'm aware of, which provides access to
an otherwise online computer conference, explicity codes a "Reply-to:
Garbage@Garbage (Don't REPLY to this message)" to avoid the problem.

Ross Patterson
Rutgers University