Ben Parker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>On Thu, 17 Sep 1998 13:22:59 -0700, "Stephen C. Nill"
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>Thus, for all pratical reasons,
>>Listserv 1.8c simply did not support editing of postings.
>
>No.  The mail clients you cited do not support Resent-xxx: headers that are
>documented in RFC822.  LISTSERV complies with the RFC, those mail clients do
>not.  PC-Pine and Pegasus do support this, but ONLY if you do not edit or
>change the message, not even to 'touch-up' a subject line.  The fundamental
>problem is RFC822 requires the From: to reflect the originator of the message.
>However, if you edit the message it is no longer that person's message, it is
>now yours because you have changed it, however little.  This leads to a
>contradiction.  Resent-xxx only works if you don't change the message and the
>From: remains intact.  If you edit it, these programs (Pine and Pegasus) won't
>let you use Resent-xxx because they insist the From: must be changed to
>reflect the new authorship.  Even if you could 'spoof' the From: address, and
>resend it to the List, it will still come back to you for approval because the
>Resent-xxx lines are absent.  If you then use the 'bounce/resend' feature it
>will work. the 2nd time around but this can get tedious for any volume of
>work.

I use Yarn in a DOS box under Win95. It follows RFC822 and supports
Resent exactly as you describe, which is fine as long as the message
does not need to be altered.

However, about half of the messages posted to the my list need to be edited
and still show as coming from the original sender. To do that in one
step, I forward (not resend) the message to the list and edit as
needed, adding "X-fwd: rars" to the header. After Yarn is exited a
post-processor that I wrote looks for "X-fwd: rars" in the header of
each message. If it finds that string, the "From: ..." line is replaced
with the "From: ..." line from the forwarded header info in the body of
the message, the appropriate "Resent-from: ..." and "Resent-to: ..."
header lines are added, an "X-editor: rex" line is added (to let
anyone who is curious know that I edited the message), and all
forward information in the body of the message is stripped.

This sounds complicated but it's easy to use. Any incoming message
that needs editing is simply forwarded to the list (with an alias so
only two keystrokes are required), edited as necessary, and the
"X-fwd: rars" added to the header (with a macro to minimize keystrokes).
When Yarn is exited, the post-processor automatically runs and
transparently fixes up all the messages. Since the appropriate Resent
lines are present the message goes directly to the list without coming
back for approval and the message appears to come from the original
poster, not from me.

The same idea should work with any email client that uses SOUP or
Unix mailbox format for outgoing mail, but the reader would probably
need to be exited to run the post-processor. I just now tried editing
Eudora's out.mbx while it was running and it allows it, but Eudora
gets unhappy later. Too bad. As a guess, it looks as if the program would
need to know the format of out.toc and fix that up whenever out.mbx was
altered.

-rex