ugh.book

78 Mail

Date: Mon, 28 Jan 91 18:54:58 EST

From: Alan Bawden <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: Depressing

Notice the typical Unix weenie reasoning here:

“The digestifier produces a header with a proper Reply-To

field, in the expectation that your mail reading tool will

interpret the header in the documented, standard, RFC822 way.

Berkeley Unix Mail, contrary to all standards, and unlike all

reasonable mail reading tools, ignores the Reply-To field and

incorrectly uses the From field instead.”

Therefore:

“The digestifier is at fault.”

Frankly, I think the entire human race is doomed. We haven’t got a

snowball’s chance of doing anything other than choking ourselves to

death on our own waste products during the next couple hundred

years.

It should be noted that this particular feature of Berkeley Mail has been

fixed; Mail now properly follows the “Reply-To:” header if it is present in

a mail message. On the other hand, the attitude that the Unix implementa-

tion is a more accurate standard than the standard itself continues to this

day. It’s pervasive. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has

embarked on an effort to rewrite the Internet’s RFC “standards” so that

they comply with the Unix programs that implement them.

>From Unix, with Love

We have laws against the U.S. Postal Service modifying the mail that it

delivers. It can scribble things on the envelope, but can’t open it up and

change the contents. This seems only civilized. But Unix feels regally

endowed to change a message's contents. Yes, of course, it’s against the

computer law. Unix disregards the law.

For example, did you notice the little “>” in the text of a previous message?

We didn’t put it there, and the sender didn't put it there. Sendmail put it

there, as pointed out in the following message: