From: <[email protected]> 77lope yourself; the computer does it for you. Computers, being the nitpick-
ers with elephantine memories that they are, keep track not only of who a
response should be sent to (the return address, called in computer parlance
the “Reply-to:” field), but where it was mailed from (kept in the “From:”
field). The computer rules clearly state that to respond to an electronic mes-
sage one uses the “Reply-to” address, not the “From” address. Many ver-
sions of Unix flaunt this rule, wrecking havoc on the unsuspecting. Those
who religiously believe in Unix think it does the right thing, misassigning
blame for its bad behavior to working software, much as Detroit blames
Japan when Detroit’s cars can’t compete.
For example, consider this sequence of events when Devon McCullough
complained to one of the subscribers of the electronic mailing list called
PAGANISM^4 that the subscriber had sent a posting to the e-mail address
[email protected] and not to the address
[email protected]:
From: Devon Sean McCullough <[email protected]>
To: <PAGANISM Digest Subscriber>This message was sent to PAGANISM-REQUEST, not PAGAN-
ISM. Either you or your ‘r’ key screwed up here. Or else the digest is
screwed up. Anyway, you could try sending it again.
—DevonThe clueless weenie sent back the following message to Devon, complain-
ing that the fault lied not with himself or sendmail, but with the PAGAN-
ISM digest itself:
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 91 11:28:11 PST
From: <Paganism Digest Subscriber>
To: Devon Sean McCullough <[email protected]>>From my perspective, the digest is at fault. Berkeley Unix Mail is
what I use, and it ignores the ‘Reply-to:’ line, using the ‘From:’ line
instead. So the only way for me to get the correct address is to either
back-space over the dash and type the @ etc in, or save it somewhere
and go thru some contortions to link the edited file to the old echoed
address. Why make me go to all that trouble? This is the main reason
that I rarely post to the PAGANISM digest at MIT.The interpretation of which is all too easy to understand:
(^4) Which has little relation to UNIX-HATERS.