Re: [opensuse] Why no Reply-To?

On Sun, 2010-02-14 at 09:15 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
On 2010/02/14 14:11 (GMT+0100) Lars Müller composed:

http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

cf. http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html

Unfortunately this one discards facts in order to make what it claims
are points.

The harmful artictle points out that if the reply-to is re-written, it
can be impossible to reach the author. The value the author put into
reply-to may have been the only place that a working address existed.

If you re-write it, it's just gone.

The not-harmful article claims that reasonable software can overcome
this, which is impossible.

I happen to administer a bunch of servers that host an application that
users use remotely. The application has the ability to send mail. The
users have to configure a reply-to address into the app so that they can
receive replies to mails they send from the app, because the servers
that physically send the mails do not receive mail. Even if these
servers did receive mail, they wouldn't relay any of it to any users,
and no users have any email clients configured to log in directly to any
of these application servers to collect mail. The _only_ way for someone
to reach the author of these emails is by referring to the reply-to,
which the user supplied and the application wrote into the original
mail. Yes the user _might_ have also written a working address in the
body of the message. Then again they might not. It's certainly not a
requirement. It's almost a requirement _not_ to these days thanks to
spammers.

If some idiot admin ignores data sanctity and erases what the _author_
wrote to replace it with what they think is cool, they have essentially
broken the email system that smarter people than them spend years
developing.

The field is there for the authors of messages to put what they know
they need in there. The field is not there for the letter carrier to
scribble over while he's carrying the letter from the authors mailbox to
the recipients.

Just one example. The general rule of simply don't mess with the data
applies without even needing a specific proof example.

--
bkw


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