Re: draft-lilly-from-optional-01.txt

In <[email protected]> Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <[email protected]> writes:

>> This latest draft fails to address the problem I reaised earlier, namely
>> that omitting the From field altogether breaks a widely deployed MTA,
>> namely sendmail (and maybe others too) which is regularly configured to
>> insert a From field of its own choosing if it finds none present
>> already.

>What do you mean by "altogether breaks"?  It looks to me like it causes
>sendmail to corrupt the message by introducing a spurious From header with
>no actual content (a bug in sendmail, IMO, as an MTA should not be
>modifying even messages that it deems syntactically invalid), but that
>seems a far cry short of "altogether breaks" and just would put sendmail
>into the class of programs that don't correctly comply with this draft.

Not sure what you mean by "a spurious From header with no actual content".
It most certainly did have a content (my own mailbox, as it happens).

Yes, it may well be regarded as a sendmail bug, but it is so widely
deployed that it cannot be ignored. And if sendmail contains that bug, who
is to say what other systems (e.g. exim) have fallen into the same error.

That is why I asked Bruce to post a test message to this list with No From
header. He claims that it will do no harm to the existing network. We
already have one counter example to that, but there are so many ways that
mail will be delivered to members of this list, and so many MTAs that it
will, have passed through, that it would soon show up if the problem were
widespread. Who knows? It might not even get through the mailing list
expander.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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