Re: Default for the envelope From in smtpmail.el

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

chad writes:
 > I was hoping to clarify for Stephen that you guys aren't talking
 > about the same cases (at least, it seemed to me that you weren't).

That's true.  AFAICT I was talking about a superset of the cases that
Glenn was, and that's important.

My basic point is that there are many different cases, and that Emacs
(when acting as an MTA, which is more or less equivalent to speaking
SMTP as it does via smtpmail.el) should try to make them all look the
same to users.  That means that smtpmail.el should *default* to using
the logged-in user's mailbox for the envelope sender.

It is true that there are fascist MTAs out there that will insist that
Sender and envelope sender be consistent (I doubt that From matters if
Sender is specified, but not very strongly ... Microsoft's sins in the
area of polluting the mail system are varied and often vicious).  As
long as they accept Sender == envelope sender, that's what I would
recommend.

Many, perhaps most, users don't know anything about Sender, and maybe
Exchange is so broken that the rule is From == envelope sender.  So
what?  As I wrote earlier, if the user is stuck with such a system and
chooses to change the From address, he'd better know what he's doing.
Among other things, he may be violating the rules of his network by
spoofing the envelope sender (eg, last time I checked this was true
for mine), or even by spoofing the From address.