Acbosgd.113
net.news
utzoo!decvax!duke!mhtsa!harpo!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Sat Oct  3 19:51:41 1981
Re:  news etc.
	From cbosg!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:ecc Sat Oct  3 01:09:18 1981
	To: v:mark
	Full-name: Eric C. Cooper
	Phone: (415) 642-7780
	Subject: news etc.

	I find it annoying when reading news (on Arpavax) that all the
	from lines are "From: csvax:<MAILING-LIST>" rather than the
	true from line of the item.  It makes it hard to filter out
	noise articles.  Can anything be done about this?

		Eric

Yes, it can, easily.  The question is "should it be?"  Here's the scoop:

Certain newsgroups (fa.all) are not supposed to be posted to by people.
Rather, you are supposed to mail to ucbvax!<NEWSGROUP>, to get it to
the arpanet people too.  This address is forged as the from address
in order to make it clear who people should reply to.  Another reason
was the gateway restriction - direct replies didn't work.

I am not entirely satisfied with this.  I think a better scheme would be
to have a "followup-to" header field and option, which the "f" command
sends mail to, and to leave the author alone.  This requires some work
on Matt's part, and is on the wish list of things to eventually do.
(If you want to implement this now, please be my guest.)

The real question here is what to do in the meantime.  Now I'm beginning
to lean toward turning off the forgery feature, so that the real sender
will be listed as the sender.  Comments?

	Mark

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
 of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/


This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 
 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.