[Exim] $reply_address - which header?

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Author: John Horne
Date:  
To: Exim Users List
Subject: [Exim] $reply_address - which header?
Hello,

We had a minor 'problem' whereby a member of staff was receiving vacation
notices for messages which he hadn't directly sent to them. However, he had
forwarded a message to the postmasters for delivery to an internal mailing
list of all the staff. My suspicion is that by forwading the message his MUA
included 'Resent-from' headers (which I gather is normal). The postmasters
sent the message on to the mailing list, but this included the Resent-from
headers. Our exim (3.13) configuration does a lookup of vacation users and
sends a message back to the sender using 'to = $reply_address' in the
autoreply transport. I can only assume that the $reply_address used the
Resent-from headers rather than the From: header (which had the postmasters
address). To confuse it more (!) the system filter file would have removed
any existing Reply-to: header and inserted one that was specified by the
postmasters (the address was actually of another member of staff within the
Uni).

So the upshot of this is (I think) that the $reply_address did not seem to
take notice of the Reply-to: or From: headers but used the Resent-from:
header. Is this possible? RFC822 is not clear over this at all, and
basically seems to 'recognise' the Resent-from header but does not state
whether it should be used.

(BTW, this all sounds vaguely familiar! Was it discussed before? I searched
the archives but couldn't really find anything about this.)

Many thanks,

John.

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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK             Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
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