More administrivia :)

(yep, it's me again).

Chuck pointed out to me that he at least (and maybe some of the rest of you) had been seeing all mail from the filk list show up as from filk-owner at herne.oz.net since I switched to the majordomo mailling list software. Well, I did a little checking and found out what might be going on. Unfortunately, the problem lies more with your mail program than with majordomo. Here's the scoop.

When majordomo (ie the mailing list) recieves a message, it resends it with the 'sender' set to '<list>-owner'. What this does is allow any bounces that the mail generates to be sent to the owners of the mailing list immediately so that they can disable that name from being sent more mail until the bounce clears up. If majordomo didn't do this, the bounces would either go back to the sender of each and every message that got sent to the list (not good since the senders cannot fix the mail addresses that are breaking and they might think it'd bounced to everyone and resend it 15 or 20 times even though it only bounced to one person.. yes, I've seen this happen) or it would bounce (with some other list software) to the list as a whole (which is bad because the bounce then bounces which then bounces which then ... well you get the picture).

So, what does this all mean? Well, what it means is that your message really has '2' from addresses. The first one is the 'from ' line (note the space) and tells the mail reading program who it thinks it recieved the message from. The second is the 'From:' line (see the colon) and it is the one that the mail program is supposed to display as the sender of the message. Most mail programs (such as unix mail, and Microsoft mail (i think) and Eudora) behave correctly, and display the right stuff to the user. CC:mail (and maybe some others) seem to be displaying the contents of the 'from ' line instead.

Unfortunately this is a bug in your mail program and there isn't much I can do about it.

Hope this explains and enlightens to folks. My only suggestion is that if you are in fact having this problem, see if you can tweak an option on your mail reading program to fix the problem OR search through the full headers for the real sender of a message.

--JT Received on 12/18/95