On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 05:17:32AM +0900, Derek Martin <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 03:18:25PM +0100, Russell King wrote: > > A5004: Exim removes Bcc: lines only if you call it with the -t option (i.e. > > when it is acting partly as an MUA). It does not remove Bcc: lines > > that > > are present in incoming SMTP mail or command-line mail that does not > > use -t. Indeed, it should not remove them, because only the > > initiating software (i.e. the MUA) can tell what to do with Bcc: > > lines; any MTA software has to leave them alone. > You wrote that this seems to suggest that the onus of what to do with > the Bcc field is on the MUA. But I don't see how it's possible to > come to that conclusion. It is only the MUA's job to compose and view > e-mail... Once a mail is composed, the MUA should pass the mail on to > the MTA to have it delivered. It is the MTA's job to determine how > and to whom the mail is delivered. Therefore, if a message composed > by an MUA contains a Bcc field, the MTA must responsibly decide how to > transfer that message to its intended recipient. But this isn't actually the way that mutt works. If mutt followed the description that you've written, your argument may make sense. However, if mutt did that, then the default call to the MTA (i.e., the $sendmail variable) would include "-t", in order to get sendmail (or compatible MTA) to parse the header. If mutt were to call $sendmail with "-t", then according to the above description, Exim would strip the Bcc header. However, as a quick empirical test reveals, mutt takes it upon itself to determine the recipients of the email. It calls $sendmail with command-line arguments for the email addresses of all of the recipients, including those specified via the Bcc header. In particular, your statement that "[i]t is the MTA's job to determine how and to whom the mail is delivered" seems to be broken by mutt. Mutt takes in upon itself to parse the Bcc header and decide to whom the mail should be delivered, and to give that explicit recipient list to the MTA. As such, it may be the proper behavior to either remove the Bcc header (i.e., unset $write_bcc by default), or to change behavior and specify "-t" to the MTA to instruct the MTA to parse the message for the recipient list, in which case the MTA should be expected to remove or modify the Bcc header. -- Bob Bell <bbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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