Re: [mlmmj] More Nits

On 7 Apr 2010, at 04:03, Ben Schmidt wrote:
On 7/04/10 12:36 PM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
>> I just noticed that mails with null envelopes were being rejected.
>> Why's that? No prob if it's legitimate, it just happened that my
>> script was using it (as opposed to any other arbitrary address).
>
> I don't know much about this, and am certainly not an authority, but I
> think null envelopes are usually used for bounce messages. In fact,
> IIRC, RFC 2821 or some other relevant RFC says that they should be used
> for bounce messages and for nothing else. Since bounce messages
> obviously aren't meant to be delivered to a mailing list, these are
> dropped (and are possibly even used for bounce processing).

RFC 5321 is the current revision on that line and indeed section 4.5.5 makes it a SHOULD that the null sender be used for the sorts of mail for which no return mail is expected, usually about previous messages. By itself though this isn't a prohibition of the null sender, though I accept that for mailing lists the use is unlikely. Perhaps a support address implemented as a mailing list could receive bounces generated by an automatically sent mail? Who knows? ...

I find that I forgot just *two more* nits:

X-No-Archive, if this were support then people who bounced wouldn't be able to collect their missing mail.

And:

Delimiter, if set to '-', causes problems when list names have '-' in them. Since this isn't the behaviour of for instance ezmlm, it'd be nice if this could be fixed somehow.

Cheers,
Sabahattin
Received on Wed Apr 07 2010 - 07:39:22 EEST