Re: [Nmh-workers] Applying alias file , to Reply-To: and From: components of a draft

[norm]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
>>Did you deduce that from the source, or from the documentation?
>>The only documentation I can find, is the man page for mh-alias.
>
>Well, I looked at the source for that.

That's cheating.:-)

More seriously, how often do you have occasion to look at the sources, in your
own use of of nmh or in answering queries. In my humble opinion, in each such
instance you might want to consider modifying the documentation, or, at least,
somehow flag, the need to modify the documentation.

>
>>It says:
>>
>>   1)     Build a list of all addresses from the message to be delivered...
>>
>>But what what is an "address from the message to be delivered". Certainly it
>>excludes strings not in a header. So, does it know what headers to look at? If
>>so, what are those headers. If not, then what does it do? This is probably all
>>obvious to you. but it's not obvious to me.
>
>So, the "message to be delivered" is obviously the draft that's fed to
>"post".  And yes, post has always read the headers for addresses; that's
>how it knows where to send things.  It also has to read the From: header
>so it can know what to send the SMTP envelope to.

But "Reply-To" has an HADR, below.  It is not all obvious, that post needs
to look at that field. In fact, I would have guessed that it was ignored
on the sending side.

>The exact list of
>headers that post knows about is:
>
>static struct headers NHeaders[] = {
>{ "Return-Path",   HBAD,                0 },
>{ "Received",      HBAD,                0 },
>{ "Reply-To",      HADR|HNGR,           0 },
>{ "From",          HADR|HNGR,           MFRM },
>{ "Sender",        HADR|HNGR|HONE,      MSND },
>{ "Date",          HBAD,                0 },
>{ "Subject",       HSUB,                0 },
>{ "To",            HADR|HTRY,           MVIS },
>{ "cc",            HADR|HTRY,           MVIS },
>{ "Bcc",           HADR|HTRY|HBCC|HNIL, MINV },
>{ "Dcc",           HADR|HTRY|HDCC|HNIL, MVIS },     /* sorta cc & bcc combin
>ed */
>{ "Message-ID",    HBAD,                0 },
>{ "Fcc",           HFCC,                0 },
>{ "Envelope-From", HADR|HONE|HEFM,      MEFM },
>{ NULL,            0,                   0 }
>};
>
>Anything with the HADR flag is a header that has an address in it, and
>those will be subject to alias expansion.  Okay, there's a longer list
>that post knows about if the draft is being sent via "dist", but if you
>care you can look at the source code yourself.  So the documentation was
>correct, but very terse :-/

That you looked to the source is silent testimony that the man page is, at
best, ambiguous.


    Norman Shapiro