Re: [Nmh-workers] RFC 5322 group support

[Ken Hornstein]

>> Not grey so much as optional - you're allowed to do it whichever way
>> you want, and ideally, the MUA would support both.
>
>Where do the RFCs hint that it is OK to remove the recipients from
>"group: a, b, c;"?

So, I've thought about this a bit more.  Here's my thinking:

- There's nothing anywhere that says MUAs and/or MTAs are not free to modify
  any message at any time for any reason (at least as far as I can
  tell); this happens all of the time and no one says boo.  All RFC 5322
  and friends really define are what the messages look like; it doesn't
  say they're immutable.

- What you feed to post(8) is technically NOT a RFC-5322 message; it's a
  nmh draft message.  This happens to look a lot like a RFC-5322 message,
  but it't not identical; for one, the headers and body can be separated
  by a series of dashes.  Also, there are a few extra headers which have
  special meaning.  Seen in that context, it's perfectly fine that email
  addresses have special interpretation; you could take the view that
  the group construct has special meaning in nmh drafts.  All that really
  matters is that the what post(8) ends up sending to the Internet has
  valid RFC-5322 syntax.

- MH has had this behavior since Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were
  in power.  If you're trying to make the case that using groups that
  include address lists is more valuable than the blind distribution
  list functionality that exists now ... well, everything I've seen says
  to me that group syntax is basically useless except in the context of
  sending blind distribution lists.  I could be persuaded that this isn't
  the case, but I haven't been persuaded yet.

--Ken