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Sat, 4 May 1991 00:35:00 PDT |
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On Wed, 1 May 91 21:15:27 +0200, Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> said:
> RFC822 does not assign any meaning to tags starting with "X-", and never
> will. These tags are reserved for "user-defined fields". LISTSERV uses
> this field to place some extra information for the human reader;
Agreed. But I think that X-To is a bad choice for this purpose.
X-Original-To is used by something else; that might be appropriate
for LISTSERV. Also, using the "Comment" list option eliminates the
problem.
> I had written ACCESS, I would not have used a tag name not containing the
> program name/prefix for internal information,
In hindsight, this is obvious. But the UCLA ACP (which ACCES/MVS is a
derivation from) is somewhere around 10-20 years old. "Things were
simpler back then."
> and I would certainly not
> show such internal data to the end user (what would you say if you
> started getting a bunch of "X-LSVxxx:" tags on each and every posting?).
Again you're right. And when ACP (Acces/MVS) mail is processed by
UCLA/Mail, the X-TO/X-FROM are removed. The user does not see them.
Well, actually, the relevant information is preserved in a Received
line.
All this said, what's the answer? It should be considered impossible
to get all copies of ACP, Acces/MVS, and OpenLook changed to use
something besides X-FROM/X-TO, and even if the vendors could make this
change in a timely manner, the code that they interface to would need
to be changed at the same time. Mike Stein is working on a fix for
UCLA/Mail to solve this problem. It may not be available for a while,
and not all sites will obtain the new release in a timely manner. And
not all sites with the offending software run UCLA/Mail. So I think
that it would be a good idea to change LISTSERV to not generate X-TO.
/Leonard
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