Quoth Philip Hazel on Sat, Mar 02, 2002:
> I have a colleague at work whose email address differs from mine by one
> letter only (he's also called Philip). Occasionally people send me email
> that they meant to send to him, by mistake. I don't forward it to him; I
> arrange to "resend" it to him. I expect any replies, auto or otherwise,
> not to come anywhere near me.
This is the only sensible use of such facility, except maybe
resending the message to another of your addresses (which would
be pointless with me, as they all are redirected to one place,
but I digress). As most MUAs don't even show the information in,
say, Resent-From: instead of From: in the list of messages,
redirecting (bouncing) mail makes it not obvious that the
recipient wasn't one of the original recipients (perhaps
mentioned in Bcc:). I don't know whether Windows MTAs show
Resent-* headers by default, but not all UNIX MTAs do.
It probably means that a vacation message should go to the
address in Reply-To: or From:, ignoring Resent-*, *OR* maybe if
Resent-* headers are present, no autoreply must be generated at
all. I'm not really sure about this.
> On the other hand, if somebody correctly sent me a message that I
> thought would be of interest to him, I would forward it, probably with a
> covering note. In that case, I'd expect to receive any reply.
You are correct, as usual. Forwarding mail makes it *obvious*
for the recipient that the e-mail was sent from the original
sender to the original recipient, who then decided that the final
recipient should receive the message, and (usually) wrote a
little note describing why he thought so. To make a paper mail
analogue, it's like reading the letter and sending another letter
to another person saying "I've got a message from John Doe
regarding this issue, please deal with it".
> This is all analgous to paper mail. My son no longer lives at home. If
> mail arrives for him, I "resend" it by re-addressing the envelope.
Lucky him. I need to go to my old place to pick my paper mail.
(But then, it's in the same small city (~600K people, AFAIK).)
Vadik.
--
Of course [nobody reads the docs that come with the OS] -- that
would be too easy and too quick. People know that the Unix Way
is difficult and they prefer to keep it that way.
-- Greg Black
