Quoth Philip Hazel on Wed, Sep 20, 2000:
> I have been having a forceful (but polite) argument with two users of
> Exim who think it behaves wrongly in its handling of Bcc: header lines.
> They are Mutt users, and (by default at least) Mutt leaves in Bcc:
> headers in messages it sends to Exim.
Mutt removes Bcc:, if you ask it nicely.
> Background: The only place where Bcc: is discussed is RFC 822 (and its
> draft revision).
Yes, but interaction between MUA and MTA is not something defined
in any RFC, it's a UNIX ad-hoc "standard", as is sendmail's
command line. IMO, in this case Exim should do what sendmail
does, although I do agree that removing Bcc: is MUA's job. So
the question related to this mutt vs. Exim issue are:
1. What do other MTAs (mainly sendmail) do in this case?
2. What do other MUAs (mainly mail, but also pine the dreaded,
elm, mh (when working with /usr/sbin/sendmail and not SMTP),
and others) do regarding Bcc:, and with what arguments do they
call sendmail?
> Other recipients (the Bcc: recipients) may or may not see a
> Bcc: line - this is somebody's choice (you may want to let a number of
> Bcc: recipients all see who they are).
Hmm, interesting.
> If it is the case that all users expect Bcc: never to be sent out, and
> the option of including it for some (bcc) recipients is in practice
> something that is never used or wanted, then Exim could of course be
> made to remove it (possibly optionally) to catch cases where the MUA
> doesn't.
It can be manually configured to remove the Bcc: header.
> Questions: 1. Should Exim always remove Bcc: header lines:
> (a) On messages received locally, not via SMTP?
Maybe.
> (b) On messages received using local SMTP on stdin/stdout?
I don't think so.
> (c) On messages received using SMTP over the loopback
> interface?
I don't think so.
> (d) On messages received from other hosts? Note that this
> includes "local" mail from MUAs on workstations, etc.
Definitely not. Messages in transit received over SMTP should
not be modified.
> 2. If the answer to any of 1 is yes, should this be
> optional?
Certainly.
Vadik.
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