Re: Your setting Return-Path to YOU in your cygwin@cygwin postings

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

Owen Rees wrote:
> --On Wednesday, March 04, 2009 12:07:31 +0000 Dave Korn wrote:
> 
>>   Note also how all those paths have a Mail-Followup-To header pointing
>> at the list.  Any mailer that does not respect that when you hit Reply is
>> broken and does not comply with internet standards.  The Return-Path is
>> for automated error messages *only*, not replies of any sort.
> 
> Can you give a link to the relevant internet standard please. I could
> not find it in RFC5322 (nor in RFC2822 which it obsoletes (nor in
> RFC0822 which it obsoletes)). RFC2369 which defines mailing list command
> specification header fields also says nothing about that field.
> 
> As far as I can tell, the standards define Reply-To and Return-Path but
> not Mail-Followup-To.

  Yes, you're right.  Looking at the history, it's never made it to the status
of an STD, but there was an IETF draft proposal (which is actually one stage
more advanced than an RFC):

http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/98dec/I-D/draft-ietf-drums-mail-followup-to-00.txt

and there are some more details at:

http://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html

  So it's only a de-facto standard.  Any mailer which doesn't want to
implement it is free to do so, but it is still incorrect if it uses
Return-Path for replies.

    cheers,
      DaveK