Subject: RE: Suggestions

From: Paul Vincent Craven <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Jun 97 15:07:59 -0500

On 6/27/97, Tim Showalter wrote:
>> I'd like to see a "redirect" command added to the basic actions list.
>
>What does redirect do?

Forwarding mail usually changes the "from:" from the original sender to the
person who is forwarding the mail. Redirect leaves the line alone. So a user
receiving redirected mail will see the mail as coming from the original sender, not
the person who redirected it. A user receiving forwarded mail will always have the
"from" field show the individual who redirected it. Some mail systems also
prepend a ">" to each line of a forwarded message, but not redirect mail.

>> Some method where the extension action can reference the text of the 
>message.
>> This would allow an extension action to file a message in a database for 
>example.
>
>I'm not sure what you're suggesting.  Are you looking for a way to deal with
>the insides of a message?

No, just pass the entire message (or a reference to it) to an external action
command. This would greatly enhance what extension-actions are capable of doing.
I usually think of extension actions as being some type of plug-in architecture.

>> I'd also like to see some discussion of rules on outgoing mail...
>I think this is out of scope of what I'd intended.  I also belive delayed
>mail is best done with a cron job.  Can you be more specific?

I would not want to tell a novice user how to delay mail using a cron job! My
thought was that a client could add a line to the message such as:
x-delay-mail: blah blah
And the SMTP server would not forward the mail until the specified time was
reached. Outgoing rules could also allow a company could forward a copy all
messages that employees send to the competitor's domain to the office manager, etc.

---

From: Chris Newman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jun 1997 14:38:54 -0700 (PDT)

> thought was that a client could add a line to the message such as:

I interpret "x-" as meaning "this is a proprietary non-interoperable
extension."  It's very overused.  It's also the wrong layer -- an SMTP
relay isn't supposed to look at RFC 822 headers.

> reached.

There are a number of serious security issues involved with this which
were discussed on the DRUMS mailing list.  Rough concensus was that it's a
really bad idea on the server -- it belongs in the user agent.

> Outgoing rules could also allow a company could forward a copy all

That has very serious legal implications, so it's probably best done by a
proprietary mechanism (preferably undocumented so people don't get
themselves in legal trouble by accident).