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


--On Wednesday, March 04, 2009 18:25:22 +0000 Dave Korn wrote:

draft-ietf-drums-mail-followup-to-00.txt
Expires: May 1998

It has not been followed up for over 10 years so I think that indicates
the status of the proposal as far as the IETF process is concerned.

True, but that's not the whole story; the IETF standards process has always been a lagged and idealised version of reality.

<http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/ietf-spring98-notes.html> contains an interesting note about Mail-Followup-To. It seems to have been one of a number of things considered by an IETF working group but with no agreement reached and the issue deferred to a later working group. It seems that the proposal was not revived in a later working group. If the proposal had been revived I would have expected it to appear in RFC5322 (October 2008) or for there to be something to indicate that it had been discussed.


A later internet draft <http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/ietf/mailing-list-behaviour.txt> (Expired May 2003!) seems to be suggesting that the List-Post header defined in the Standards Track RFC2369 be used. The messages I get from various cygwin lists include the RFC2369 headers.

All that would be needed to make this work would be to update all mail clients to notice RFC2369 headers and offer an explicit "Reply to list" option. While doing that, perhaps we can update all mail clients to include an "Unsubscribe" button that appears whenever the user is viewing a message with the relevant RFC2369 header.

Still, I will
reword my earlier paragraph:

  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
does not comply with common internet practice, but if it resorts to using
the Return-Path header, it is completely incorrect.  The Return-Path is
for automated error messages *only*, not replies of any sort.

I am not convinced that Mail-Followup-To is common practice. Do most mailing lists insert it? cygwin apparently does but cygwin-talk does not nor do any of the other mailing lists to which I subscribe. Do the most widely used clients and webmail services support it?


Even if is is supported, the expired internet draft suggests that it is used to deal with "reply to all" which I would consider to be encouraging people to use a button that causes more problems than it solves and which ought to be abolished. The I-D appears to be suggesting that "Reply" be interpreted as "Reply to author" and it should use the Reply-to if it exists and From if not.

It is certainly true that using Return-Path for replies is wrong but there are very few circumstances under which it is used at all. The return-path line preserves the reverse-path information from the SMTP envelope; it is the envelope reverse-path that is used to report errors, the return-path line usually does not exist at the point where delivery errors are detected.

--
Owen Rees; speaking personally, and not on behalf of HP.
========================================================
Hewlett-Packard Limited.   Registered No: 690597 England
Registered Office:  Cain Road, Bracknell, Berks RG12 1HN


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