Re: Who sets Sender:?

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

* prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)  on Tue, 21 May 2002
| Such as?

Such as the vacation program.  If ratinox@peorth.gweep.net is me and the
vacation program is not me, then how should the headers be set up?

Such as if for some whacked reason you let me borrow prj@po.cwru.edu.
Which of us is that mailbox, really?

What it ammounts to is this: if an individual has many identities then all
mail is treated identically, but if an individual has one identity then
many messages need to be treated differently depending on circumstances.
Apply Occam's Razor.

[...]
| I don't see why.  Anyone who's interested in the route the message was
| sent by can look at the Received fields.

Sender is not about message routing.  It is about who did what.  Sender is
a social construct, similar to a secretary's mark at the end of typed
message noting who did the typing.

| > Sender -is- unimportant for mail.  My opinion is that Sender should
| > never be generated automatically for mail.
| Agreed.

Well, at least we agree on something, here :).

[...]
| Exactly *which*?  Those are mutually exclusive, or were meant to be.
| Should my MUA stop me from sending a response to the Sender address?

No.  The MUA should never stop you from doing something manually unless
what you are doing will not work.  Typing the Sender address into the To
field of a new message is human consumption.  The MUA should never
automatically supply the Sender address for anything.

-- 
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