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Re: [ietf-smtp] Who should set the Sender: header field?

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Mon, 13 December 2021 19:25 UTC

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Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2021 14:24:52 -0500
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: ietf-smtp@ietf.org
Cc: vesely@tana.it
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Subject: Re: [ietf-smtp] Who should set the Sender: header field?
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It appears that Alessandro Vesely  <vesely@tana.it> said:
>using Thunderbird, for one, it is easy to modify the From: field of the message 
>being edited, possibly setting multiple mailboxes.  However, that software 
>omits to add a Sender: field, which is required in such cases.  Where's the 
>bug?  Options are:
>
>* The MUA should prompt for a Sender:, or

How very annoying for the 99% of cases where the sender would be
redundant with the from.

>* the submission server adds Sender according to the logged-in identity.

Sorry, but submission servers are not the source of truth for someone's "real"
email address, much less their identity.  I have hundreds of e-mail addresses.
All of them are me, and I would not appreciate some piece of software picking
one arbitrarily and adding a sender header to my mail.  

On my system, the submission server puts the submission account, which
is not necessarily an email address, in the Received header in case
there is some need to figure out where a message came from.

>I realize that both might take care of that, but where should I file a bug first?

Nowhere, please.  If for some reason you want to add a sender header, there are
plugins like Header Tools which let you do so.

R's,
John

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