Re: Disable generation of "Sender: " by default.

[Toby Speight <streapadair@gmx.net>]

0> In article <m37l4zau28.fsf@peorth.gweep.net>,
0> Stainless Steel Rat <URL:mailto:ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> ("Rat") wrote:

Rat> RFC 822: Sender is the agent responsibible for submitting a
Rat> message to the network when he is someone other than the
Rat> originator of the message.  Ie, if you write a message and I
Rat> send it, you are the originator (From) and I am the submitter
Rat> (Sender).  Sender is generated by hand -- never software --
Rat> when more than one agent is involved.  It exists only to
Rat> denote this fact.
Rat>
Rat> RFC 1036: Sender exists as a crude authentication mechanism.
Rat> Sender is the authenticated (by software) local mailbox of the
Rat> originator of the message when that mailbox differs from the one
Rat> in the originator header.  Ie, if I am on, say, skuld.gweep.net
Rat> w/ login 'ratinox' and I post a news article with
Rat> 'grumble@bogus.com' as my From header, then some program
Rat> somewhere must generate 'Sender: ratinox@skuld.gweep.net'.
Rat>
Rat> They are not even vaguely close to each other.  My opinion is
Rat> that RFC 1036's Sender is badly broken, because it utterly fails
Rat> to accomplish its goal.  RFC 822's Sender does exactly what it is
Rat> intended to do, no more, no less.

This is pretty much how I see it, too - except that it's impossible
in general for the software to know how to find the user's "local"
mailbox.  So it's not reliable as a deliverable address.  This was
really frustrating when trying to cancel a message sent from a
100-machine workstation cluster, and only being able to do so from
the exact same machine, despite the fact that they all shared the
same filesystem image and MX host. :-(