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:

From: MAILER-DAEMON@berkeley.edu 79 Date: Thu, 9 Jun 1988 22:23 EDT From: pgs@xx.lcs.mit.edu To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: mailer warts Did you ever wonder how the Unix mail readers parse mail files? You see these crufty messages from all these losers out in UUCP land, and they always have parts of other messages inserted in them, with bizarre characters before each inserted line. Like this: From Unix Weenie piffle!padiddle!pudendum!weenie Date: Tue, 13 Feb 22 12:33:08 EDT From: Unix Weenie piffle!padiddle!pudendum!weenie To: net.soc.singles.sf-lovers.lobotomies.astronomy.laser- lovers.unix.wizards.news.group In your last post you meant to flame me but you clearly don’t know what your talking about when you say % $ Received: from magilla.uucp by gorilla.uucp % $ via uunet with sendmail % $ … so think very carefully about what you say when you post From your home machien because when you sent that msg it went to all the people who dont want to read your falming so don’t do it ):-( Now! Why does that “From” on the second line preceding paragraph have an angle bracket before it? I mean, you might think it had some- thing to do with the secret codes that Usenet Unix weenies use when talking to each other, to indicate that they're actually quoting the fif- teenth preceding message in some interminable public conversation, but no, you see, that angle bracket was put there by the mailer. The mail reading program parses mail files by looking for lines beginning with “From.” So the mailer has to mutate text lines beginning with “From” so’s not to confuse the mail readers. You can verify this for yourself by sending yourself a mail message containing in the mes- sage body a line beginning with “From.” This is a very important point, so it bears repeating. The reason for “From” comes from the way that the Unix mail system to distinguishes between multiple e-mail messages in a single mailbox (which, following the Unix design, is just another file). Instead of using a special control sequence, or putting control information into a separate file, or putting a