Xref: utzoo news.admin:4211 news.sysadmin:1867 comp.mail.uucp:2482
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Rewriting From: lines
Message-ID: <1988Dec8.212007.17833@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1227@vsi1.UUCP> <871@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> <944@dlhpedg.co.uk> <1296@ucsd.EDU> <10510@swan.ulowell.edu> <504@pacbell.PacBell.COM>
Date: Thu, 8 Dec 88 21:20:07 GMT

In article <504@pacbell.PacBell.COM> david@pacbell.PacBell.COM (David St.Pierre) writes:
>System V behavior is to prepend a From_ to each message. That's it.

In fact, this considerably pre-dates System V, and RFC822 (although not
its predecessors) as well.  This is the *standard* mailer behavior for
uucp mail, dating back to V7.  Any mailer that can't cope with other mailers
doing it has broken backward compatibility, a very stupid thing to do in
this network.

>... Or hack another flag into sendmail (:-) to
>continually consolidate From_ lines.

Actually, the only program that should ever consolidate From_ lines is
the user agent at the receiver.  Consolidation removes information, and
should not be done gratuitously by relay sites.  (We won't even mention
that 4.1 and, I think, all its successors, have bugs in the consolidation
code...)  Alas, there are a lot of misguided mailers that do consolidation
at the drop of a hat...
-- 
SunOSish, adj:  requiring      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
32-bit bug numbers.            | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu