Re: Sender header?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@acm.org> writes:

> Presently I am just doing a:

>         ;; Fix message send address (I don't have a real hostname
>         (defun message-make-sender ()
>           "Return own mail address as sender"
>           (message-make-address))

(setq message-syntax-checks '((sender . disabled)))

has worked great for years.  Hopefully it hasn't been broken in later
versions of Gnus.  It should be the default.

I've heard all of the same arguments that Rat's making many, many times.
I don't think they're supported by the RFCs (and the discussion I've read
on DRUMS backs that up), and whether they are or not, the Sender header is
broken beyond recovery and shouldn't be encouraged.  Like automatically
converting eight spaces to a tab or the Lines header on Usenet, it's one
of those ideas that had some marginal utility originally but never
actually worked very well in practice and is now better forgotten.

Sender is useful if you are using in the From field an address that has
*nothing* to do with the entity that actually sent the mail, in which case
it's sometimes useful to put some valid mailbox in there.  Anything that
automatically generates the header is just going to cause far more
problems than it solves.  Tracing is what Received headers are for.

The only real widespread use of Sender these days is in mailing lists
(particularly ones based on Majordomo); hopefully List-ID and relatives
will replace that last use with a better-designed system.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>