From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Wed Oct 18 2000 - 12:20:43 CDT
Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se):
> Obviously you want to do more with it than Charles intended.
I don't know what Charles intended, and I don't particularly care. I don't
believe that he created the header. I do know what I intended when I
worked on a mail-news integration RFC a few years back, and that was to
allow people to detect and act upon copies of news articles that show up
in their email.
> But "From" is nicely displayed in the list of my mails.
So what? Your email agent displays it. Your argument is that if it is for
display only, then it should be in the body. Why should From: be a header?
Surely your mail agent could parse the body to find it, and maybe it would
even be displayed more nicely in the body. I expect, considering the .se
in your domain name, that it would be a lot easier to get the text in the
body right for many of your neighbor's email addresses than it will be to
get mailers around the world to do the right thing with it in a header.
I expect that mail software will also nicely display other headers when
they become of interest and defined. And if not, I press "v" or "h" and it
shows all the headers to me. Some "head over heels" requirement, no?
> It is possible that some people would say that Reference is only for
> display. But they would be wrong.
No, they would be right. My mail agent doesn't "nicely display" the
References header, nor does it do anything at all with it. It is useless,
and should be removed from the spec. Put it in the body where it belongs.
Do you see the error in making the "my mailer does this" argument
regarding headers? Let's argue about making the information available and
let the agent authors worry about how it is displayed or not.
> Problem is that he can't
> specify a behaviour for it in a news standard.
Excuse me? Of course WE can specify a behaviour for it in a news standard,
when it is news software that is to insert it in messages. We cannot
demand that mail-only agents do anything with it, but neither can we
damand that they do anything with From:, Date:, References:, or any of the
other headers that are often included in mail. Let's argue that all of
those headers are excluded from email sent by a news agent. I'll support
you -- outgoing email from a news client needs to have NO headers at all,
since we (as a news RFC) cannot demand that a mail agent do anything
reasonable with them.
> It is also quite surprising that your first strongly argumentet against
> verifying the From address having MUST - where you had a point - and
> now call for a MUST for something which is completely irrelevant for
> interoperability.
I learned quite a bit about "interoperability" from that discussion.
Interoperability is not about what makes things break or allows them to
work, it is about anything that makes life convenient for anyone at some
time in their life. Having an invalid From header in news doesn't break
news in any way, it just makes it less convenient for someone to contact
the poster in email. Not one person could say that "news breaks with
invalid From: headers because...", all they could say was "I can't press
one button and send email...".
If people are going to claim "interoperability" for things that don't
cause anything to break, well, damn it, I'm going to use the same argument
to make my life easier, too. If being able to send email to a poster is
"interoperability" for news systems, then being able to throw away an
errant news message generated by rude people who think they have to send
me an email copy of their messages is just as much an interoperability
issue. So there. If sending it to me is interoperability, throwing it away
automatically is, too.
Every person who was arguing with me about MUST for the From: header
should now be on my side when I say MUST for this header. If they aren't,
then when did they change their minds about interoperability, and better
yet, let's go back and correct the text on the From: header being invalid.