From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Mon Jan 29 2001 - 13:55:40 CST
On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 12:58:57PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
> >> Remove the From: header altogether and
> >> let's stop violating privacy principles.
> >
> >As I said before: Let's make it optional.
>
> From C News experience, many things will break if you do that. Quite a
> bit of software assumes that the six classically-mandatory headers are
> always there. We originally left From and Subject optional -- after all,
> nothing in the server software needed to look at them -- but we caught so
> much flak over it that we gave in and started insisting on them being
> present.
>
> The *contents* of From may be a privacy issue, but its presence is an
> interoperability issue.
>
Well, strictly speaking from a legacy standpoint that's true, if we tried
to take it out, older software would break and probably not propagate
the articles.
One could design a network without the From line, but in practice, looking
at all the people who put in a false from line, few, aside from spammers
put in a zero-information from line. They usually want to say something
about the origin of the article, to be displayed in the box that
newsreaders display that (as opposed to what they say in the signature.)
So I think the current proposal to use .invalid to indicate "I'm saying
something but E-mail to the address won't work."
We could define a neutral form From: x@invalid or x@x.invalid if the
former breaks anything, for those who truly wish to say nothing.