From: MAILER-DAEMON@berkeley.edu 77 lope 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 PAGANISM4 that the subscriber had sent a posting to the e-mail address PAGANISM-REQUEST@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU and not to the address PAGANISM@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU: From: Devon Sean McCullough devon@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu 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. —Devon The 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 devon@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu 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: 4Which has little relation to UNIX-HATERS.

78 Mail Date: Mon, 28 Jan 91 18:54:58 EST From: Alan Bawden alan@ai.mit.edu 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: