On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Piete Brooks wrote:
> > The RFC says that Bcc: shouldn't be passed on to primary recipients.
> > If exim passes it on (as it does) then it isn't following the RFC.
>
> exim has no concept of a "primary recipient" *UNLESS* it has been given the
> "-t" HACK to tell it to generate the recipients.
Quite. The RFC in question is RFC 822. This is the definition of the
message formats the MUAs generate. Exim is written to RFC 821. That does
indeed say that the messages it is concerned with are in 822 format, but
it doesn't require the MTA to mess with them, and indeed discourages it.
This Bcc stuff is all an MUA function.
> If it is working as a true MTA, it cannot correlate actual recipients with RFC
> 822 headers.
Absolutely.
> > It should assume that if there is a Bcc: header then the client wants
> > it to go out
Why? If a message comes in from some random other MTA, how can Exim tell
what the sender wants?
You could perhaps argue that it should take them out of all locally-
submitted messages, but that then takes away control from the MUA. It
also doesn't do anything for those who run their MUAs on their desktop
PCs rather than on the MTA machine.
It all feels like a rathole to me.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
--
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