Re: The job of an MSA

[Randall Gellens <[e-mail]>]

At 4:47 PM -0400 8/16/04, Tony Hansen wrote:

>  The current SUBMIT protocol clearly identifies which headers it is 
> allowed to mess around with. The To/Cc/Bcc headers are not in that 
> list.

RFC 2476 does permit some alteration of address headers:

>  8.7.  Resolve Aliases
>
>     The MSA MAY resolve aliases (CNAME records) for domain names, in the
>     envelope and optionally in address fields of the header, subject to
>     local policy.
>
>     NOTE:  Unconditionally resolving aliases could be harmful.  For
>     example, if www.example.net and ftp.example.net are both aliases for
>     mail.example.net, rewriting them could lose useful information.
>
>  8.8.  Header Rewriting
>
>     The MSA MAY rewrite local parts and/or domains, in the envelope and
>     optionally in address fields of the header, according to local
>     policy.  For example, a site may prefer to rewrite 'JRU' as '
>     J.Random.User' in order to hide logon names, and/or to rewrite '
>     squeeky.sales.example.net' as 'zyx.example.net' to hide machine names
>     and make it easier to move users.
>
>     However, only addresses, local-parts, or domains which match specific
>     local MSA configuration settings should be altered.  It would be very
>     dangerous for the MSA to apply data-independent rewriting rules, such
>     as always deleting the first element of a domain name.  So, for
>     example, a rule which strips the left-most element of the domain if
>     the complete domain matches '*.foo.example.net' would be acceptable.

draft-gellens-submit-bis-00.txt has the same text, also in 8.7 and 8.8.