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: