Cameron Simpson writes:
> - A To: faq-maintainers@... would be very good.
> These "recipient list not shown:;" things are very annoying.
Lyris used to change the To: line. I complained, because it
did not fix the Cc: line to agree. Specifically, when I did
"To: individual" and "Cc: faqlist", Lyris changed the To:
line to "To: faqlist" but did not change the Cc: line,
hiding the information that I had copied the individual and
making it appear that I had sent two copies to the list.
Josh told me in private that he fixed this a couple of weeks
ago. Thus I assume that any "recipient list not shown"
comes from the original message and has nothing to do with
Lyris.
> - Why to the X-Lyris-... headers have things which look superficially
> like email addresses but actually have "mailto:" stuck on the front?
Well, obviously because they are mailto: URLs. Why, I can't
say for sure. Probably has to do with the growing
integration of mailers with web browsers. If a
browser/mailer recognizes these headers, then the user only
has to click on the List-Unsubscribe URL to leave the list.
You'll note that no message is needed, only the address. So
far, I think mailers integrated with browsers are a
disaster. But they are here, and if they have useful
capabilities, we might as well enable them. In this case,
it does make subscription maintenance easier for the
subscriber, while keeping the information unobtrusive -- no
10-line appendix on every message saying how to
unsubscribe.
There is the issue that these headers are not defined in
RFCs yet are not prefixed by X-. RFC822 strongly implies
that any header not formally defined should be an X-
header, but stops short of actually saying so. I'd say the
names are a poor choice in this sense, but not illegal.
> We get a fair number of bounces from people using addresses which
> look like mailto:who@where here, and I'm beginning to wonder if
> Lyris or something like it is responsible for tsome of them.
Given the huge number of mailto: URLs lying around on the
web, I wouldn't be inclined to blame Lyris for this. It's
very easy to copy a URL in a web browser and paste it into
a mailer -- people may do this if the communication between
the browser and the mailer is messed up, or if the browser
wants to use a different mailer from the one the user
wants, or if the user has an old browser that doesn't bring
up the mailer, or if the user doesn't know that clicking on
the mailto: URL brings up the mailer. Then the user pastes
the URL into the To: field and forgets to edit out the
"mailto:" part.
The headers are ones that most normal mailers won't
recognize and thus won't do anything with. Only spammers
assume anything that looks like a duck actually is a duck.
> Is there a reason the X-Lyris- addresses need a mailto: on the front,
Well, because they are URLs. Why are they URLs? I don't
know, but they are.
> and if they do, why are they inside <> markers?
Because that's the syntax of a URL ...
This is getting a bit circular. They have the syntax
<mailto:user@domain> because they are URLs, and I know they
are URLs because they have that syntax. But short of any
better reasoning, that's the way it is.
Edward Reid
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