Re: Hiding one's email source username/hostname/ISP

[Bob Carragher]

Documentation is usually the last thing to receive any love ...
if it receives much/any at all.  In that vein, would it make
sense to focus that "love" on mh-profile(5mh), and then provide
minimal information plus a "see mh-profile entry XYZ" for the man
page portion of any switch that provides a command-line mechanism
for an mh-profile entry that is precisely a duplication?  (One
bonus is that there's less sync-ing/harmonizing required across
multiple man pages.)

                                Bob

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021 03:39:56 -0500 Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> sez:

> >Ken:  I would not be opposed to documenting this particular
> >undocumented switch, though I can imagine why it was left
> >undocumented in the first place.
>
> Well, ABOUT that.  While it seems that -client was never
> documented, clientname (in mts.conf) was always documented, but
> not very well, back in the MH-6.8 days (I thought maybe
> clientname did something else, but no ... that's all it ever
> did).  Now, why was -client undocumented?  No idea!  The code
> has been there for approximately forever and we've just been
> bringing it forward.  Honestly, I think every switch to every
> MH/nmh program warrants SOME kind of documentation, because
> otherwise poor schmucks like me are puzzling over it years
> later.  Yes, put some documentation in for -idanno!  Maybe
> someone else will make use of it!
>
> And in CASE you're wondering ... -idanno is a special flag used
> to communicate annotation information up from post(8) to higher
> level programs.  It means, "Write annotation information to the
> file descriptor given as the argument to -idanno".  What that
> really means is that if you give post(8) something like
> "-idanno 8", then post will write a list of email addresses
> that it is sending to, one per line, to whatever is opened on
> file descriptor 8.  And then ... well, what actually happens
> AFTER post(8) does that is kind of complicated and involves
> some magic environment variables, and we should really document
> that all.  It's kind of documented in mh-profile, but not very
> well.
>
> --Ken