[META] RE: Bring back the return address

From: Nelson Minar (nelson@media.mit.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 16 1997 - 09:52:35 EDT


Bleah, I hate to waste a mailing list's time with this sort of
technical detail, but it's important and something most people don't
understand. The unicode list is just now beginning to behave like a
normal list. Please don't ask for it to be changed back to the weird
behaviour of rewriting the From: header.

The best way to filter a mailing list is based on a Sender: header. A
lot of mailing list software inserts a handy header like
  Sender: owner-coderpunks@toad.com
in the message. You can use this as an unambiguous thing to filter on.

Unfortunately, the Unicode list (and a fair number of other lists)
happen to not set that header. The next best thing is the Errors-To
header. The Unicode list uses this header:
  Errors-To: uni-bounce@unicode.org

A procmail recipe to unambiguously filter out unicode mail, then, is
like this:

  :0:
  * ^Errors-To: uni-bounce@unicode\.org
  unicode.mbox

If your filter software for some reason can't see these headers, then
your filter software is badly broken and will hamper you from reading
a lot of mailing lists, not just this one. You're better off getting
software that works correctly.

RFC822 (and it's undocumented extensions) forever,
  Nelson :-)



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