[Mailman-Users] cause of bounces

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:

 > I don't agree that it is a completely new message. I think it is
 > still the original message with only technical and formatting
 > changes.

The IETF's position is that this decision is up to the forwarding
agent.  If they change the Message-ID, that means they consider it a
new message, and are taking authorship (perhaps with substantial
quoting, but it's quoting, not forwarding).  If they don't, it's not
new, and From MUST contain the address placed there by the original
author.  (That's an RFC-2119 "must".  This is why Mark is correct to
say that Munge From is non-conforming.)

The IETF has NO position on WHEN this should be done because it's not
relevant to interoperability.  My personal reasoning with respect to
mailing list managers like Mailman which normally pass through all
text/plain, and perhaps add some tags to Subject and prefix or suffix
the body, is that users (including posters) would be quite annoyed if
de-duping didn't work.  And those of us who deal with mail in
sophisticated ways would be quite upset if the Message-ID we give it
doesn't correspond to the Message-ID distributed by the list and in
the archive.


 > However, if you are just sending the body of the original message From:
 > the list, according to RFC 5322 et al, you are saying the list is the
 > author of that message body. This is not true and is why I say the
 > message is not compliant with RFC 5322 et al.

This isn't quite accurate.  We do make an effort to identify the
author, so I wouldn't say we're "claiming authorship".  The problems
are that we make it impossible to identify the author by the usual
methods (filtering on email address), and it's ugly, especially for
folks with MUAs that display only the display name (and of course we
had a lot of people rather confused by this through most of 2014!)

Steve


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