Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
To: Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE>
Cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: Comments and Resent-* header fields 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 24 Sep 1995 16:57:55 +0200."
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 07:59:17 +1000
Message-Id: <20262.811979957@munnari.OZ.AU>
From: Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>

    Date:        Sun, 24 Sep 1995 16:57:55 +0200
    From:        Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.SUNET.SE>

    That's fine, but not 13 years after the fact.

No, any time there is a need, whevenever.   People are still
working on standardising road signs, children's toy safety,
character sets, ... all of which have been around much longer
than 13 years.   If differences cause confusion, the right
thing to do is eliminate the differences, as much as possible.
It can often take years to discover these areas of confusion.

    We've been through that already.

And mostly it has worked, but nothing is perfect - the e-mail
standards have problems, those should be fixed.

    You have clearly confused "do not use the Resent-* fields
    to determine message  origin or show them by default"
    with "do not provide a command that allows Resent-* fields
    to be displayed upon request).

No, never the latter - though in the first message I sent on
this subject it seemed as though I intended that (which I
corrected in the next message).   I wouldn't even go as far
as "not show them by default" necessarily, that's up to the
user & UA, though I would say that if shown they should be
shown in a way that doesn't cause confusion with the other
headers.
    
    Which, I'm afraid, it's quite a serious problem.
   "Why did this guy write to me, I don't even know him!"

That is really going to be a user issue - normally mail shouldn't
be just redirected to people who don't expect to receive such
messages.   The usual case will be to redirect mail to people
who get mail from random people all the time (help desk support
people, sales representatives, ...).

However, this is not something we can do anything about, there is
a clear need to be able to "move" mail from one user to another
more appropriate to deal with it, people will do that when
required, whatever the mechanism.  If there is no workable
annotation, they will do it without annotating.  The annotation
seems useful to keep to me, even if some brain dead systems chop
it (those are no worse than not having it exist originally).

Encapsulated forwarding is fine, but unless the recipient's
mailer is going to automatically decapsulate and present the
included message as if it had arrived unencapsulated, receiving
messages this way is a burden on the recipient - they have to
do something to get the included message into the form where it
is, or appears, as a first class message, so they can act upon
it.  That extra is enough to cause people not to want to use this
technique for messages where the only point of forwarding
(redirecting, whatever) is so the new recipient can treat the
message as a first class object, and act upon it, with the
intermediary not playing any further part.

kre