miss addressed mail

[Paul Howarth]

Mike Witt wrote:
>>On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 00:25, Richard E Miles wrote:
> 
> 
>>It is certainly possible to write a procmail recipe to deal with all
>>mail that you call mis-addressed. However, you may find that it handles
>>more mail than you are expecting. Take for instance any message you
>>receive from this mailing list and look at the headers. You won't find
>>your address in either the To: or Cc: header. This is very common
>>behaviour for mailing lists, as you can do the same thing yourself by
>>using Bcc: for a recipient in your mail software when sending mail.
> 
> 
> Well, mail from the Fedora list certainly does contain the "for" line
> in question. Here's the onereceiptour msg:
> 
>    Received: from hormel.redhat.com (hormel.redhat.com [209.132.177.30])
>         by Num9.Com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id iA480MdH004156
>         for <MW_Fedora at num9.com>; Thu, 4 Nov 2004 00:00:22 -0800
> 
> But I gather, from what you're saying, that this is only because
> the Fedora mailer explicitly includes that line in the headers,
> and it is not generated on reciept by my sendmail. So, it's not
> guaranteed to to be there. Do I have that right?

Not quite; it's because your mail server (Num9.Com) is only seeing a single 
recipient for this email, so it adds the "for" clause. If there was someone 
else with a @num9.com address on fedora-list, there would be multiple 
recipients for the mail and the "for" clause wouldn't be added by your mail 
server. It's your mail server that's adding this Received: header, not the 
originating mail server.

(note: some mail servers, notably qmail, always send mail to a single 
recipient at a time even if there are multiple recipients for the mail at a 
domain, and others can be configured to do so. Whilst this is very 
inefficient, particularly for large messages, mail you receive from such mail 
servers should always cause your mail server to add the "for" clause in the 
Received: header)

Paul.