Re: Mail clients that abuse the Sender: line

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From: Tony Finch
Subject: Re: Mail clients that abuse the Sender: line
Date: 17:24 on 04 Oct 2006
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Shawn P. Stanley wrote:

> Gmail uses the "Sender:" line to show which Gmail account you're
> sending from regardless of how you've configured your "From:" or
> "Reply-To:" lines.  Just in case anyone cares about your Gmail
> account.  But why should they, unless you're dealing in kiddie p0rn?

This is a knotty area. I like this idea: it's what 2822 says Sender: is
for and 4409 recommends that submission servers fix up Sender: in this
way. In fact I want to do it at work to protect against undergraduates
playing silly email forgery games. However Sendmail has never done this,
not even for local submissions. (Exim follows the standard more closely,
whereas Postfix follows Sendmail.) So it isn't entirely surprising that it
is screwed up by the dickheads at MICROS~1 who code to cargo cult ideas of
implementation behaviour rather than looking at the actual specifications.

Tony.
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