From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 16:32:00 CDT
wish-usefor <wish-usefor@dumain.com> writes:
> I think you are incorrect in assuming an absolute right of the poster to
> control the mailbox used to post.
I think more to the point this is outside of the scope of an IETF RFC. We
can indicate the meaning of the headers, we can state what automatic
program behavior should be, but when it comes down to people explicitly
and intentionally doing something contrary to the stated meaning of the
headers, there really isn't all that much that we can do. It's only a
technical interoperability standard, not a law.
Accordingly, I'd prefer to avoid any mention at all of what the software
should do if the user explicitly overrode it, since at this point we're
talking about user interface issues that seem rather outside the scope of
the standard. Instead, I think we should state that if Mail-Copies-To is
set to "never", this indicates that the poster never wants an e-mailed
copy of followups and that a followup agent MUST NOT send such a copy. Is
there any real need to say anything more than that, or even mention user
overrides at all?
If people want to force a copy for some bizarre reason (and I can think of
times where it may be necessary, although all my examples are within
cooperating subnets), well, then they're not using a followup agent any
more.
Similarly, for the case of no header, why not just say that if the
Mail-Copies-To header is not present at all, the article should by default
be treated as if it had "Mail-Copies-To: never"? This neatly leaves open
the possibility of changing the defaults for some particular circumstances
(such as mailing lists gatewayed to newsgroups, like many of the gnu.*
lists, where you have to send a copy to the original poster under many
situations or they'll never see it -- they're often not aware that the
address to which they're mailing reaches a newsgroup at all), while still
making the general protocol statement we want to make about the common
case.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>