FYI *---------------------- Original message follows -----------------------* Date sent: Sat, 4 Mar 1995 16:52:18 +1200 Send reply to: Pegasus Mail Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> From: David Harris <[log in to unmask]> Organization: Pegasus Mail, Dunedin, New Zealand Subject: IMPORTANT! Re: Receipt Confirmation Question To: James Ford <[log in to unmask]> > Why do receipt confirmation go to the reply-to address rather than to > the X-Confirm-Reading-To address ? What's the purpose of this header > field then ? I owe the list and all my users an apology over this. First of all, you should understand that I regard Pegasus Mail's "confirmation of reading" as a form of automatic reply, not as a message transport status message. Accordingly, under RFC822, Pegasus Mail follows the parsing rules EXACTLY by using the Reply-to: then the From: address. I believe that Pegasus Mail is NOT at fault here - the problem is a more general problem with the way list mail is managed on the Internet. There is no standard for where the List puts its own address and there is no reliable way of detecting that mail originates from a mailing list. Having said that, it became clear to me several releases ago that the path of least resistance for fixing the problem of receipts going to lists was for me to change Pegasus Mail, since the rest of the Internet clearly wasn't going to fall into any kind of shape very quickly. Accordingly, I changed Pegasus Mail's receipt confirmation mechanism so that instead of simply having "X-PMRQC: 1" in the headers and using a standard reply mechanism, I use a special "directed" header which contains the specific address to which confirmations should be sent. This special header is "X-CONFIRM-READING-TO:" and is generated by all versions of Pegasus Mail for DOS v3.2 and later, WinPMail v1.2 and later, and Pegasus Mail/Mac v2.1 and later. If this header is present, these versions of Pegasus Mail are meant to send confirmations to the address it specifies; if only an X-PMRQC header is present (ie, the sender used an old version of Pegasus Mail), it will use the old confirmation method, following the Reply-to: address then the From: address, in that order. Recently I have had a number of complaints about confirmations going to lists, and have assumed that this was arising from SENDERS using old versions of Pegasus Mail. Unfortunately, I now find that this is actually a goof on my part. While Pegasus Mail is GENERATING the correct "X-Confirm-Reading-To" header, it is actually SEARCHING incoming messages for a header called "X-Confirm-RECEIPT-To", which it will never find. Accordingly, all confirmation requests are being handled in the traditional way which, although I still believe it is quite proper and legal, is not useful. To fix this problem, open the .EXE file for the Pegasus Mail version you have using a binary editor such as "Hacker's View" or "Norton's Disk Edit"; locate the string "X-CONFIRM-RECEIPT-TO" (there is only one copy in the .EXE file) and change it to "X-CONFIRM-READING-TO". This will correct the problem and will allow Pegasus Mail to send directed confirmations of reading. You can expect to find the string at approximately these hexadecimal offsets in the .EXE file: For Pegasus Mail/DOS v3.22 -- 215B5H (136629 decimal) For WinPMail v1.22 -- B8A7H (47271 decimal) Once again, my apologies to you all over this; the hardest problems to find are often the ones you think you've fixed. Cheers! -- David -- ------------------ David Harris -+- Pegasus Mail -------------------------- Box 5451, Dunedin, New Zealand | e-mail: [log in to unmask] +64 3 4536880/Fax +64 3 4536612 | CIS: >internet:[log in to unmask] Quote for the day: "If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end-to-end I wouldn't be at all surprised." -- Dorothy Parker