Subject: Question:

From: Highway 'Nakoruru' YAH! <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 00:15:20 -0400 (EDT)

Why is it that when I save my incoming file to another folder, the
author for the email is changed to my account name?  Before, in the
old version, I would save mail in one file and type:

	from -f ~/mail/<filename>

it would list the mail items with the proper address it came from,
but with the new version, it changes all the email address of where
it's from to my userid.

	from -f ~/mail/<filename>

	From [email-masked] Thu Oct 21 22:02:21 1993
	From [email-masked] Thu Oct 21 22:10:52 1993
	From [email-masked] Thu Oct 21 23:22:11 1993

Like that... how do I fix that or how do I change settings?

--------------------- [ National Service Fraternity ] ----------------------
  UU   UU MM   MM DDDDDD        [email-masked]       EEEEEEE MM   MM
  UU   UU MMM MMM DD   DD "the snuggly, cuddly care bear" EE      MMM MMM
  UU   UU MM M MM DD   DD       124 Englefield Drive      EEEEE   MM M MM
  UU   UU MM   MM DD   DD     Gaithersburg, MD  20878     EE      MM   MM
  UUUUUUU MM   MM DDDDDD           (301) 948-5174         EEEEEEE MM   MM
  University of Maryland   Internet: [email-masked]    Epsilon  Mu
       College Park          Bitnet: [email-masked]     Alpha Phi Omega
----------------- [ In Leadership, Friendship & Service ] ------------------
{What is your name?}                                     (Jean-Luc Picard.)
{What is your quest?}              (To seek out new life and civilization.)
{What is the average warp speed of a bird of prey?}   (Klingon or Romulan?)
{What?  I don't know that??!?!  AIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!}

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1993 00:30:15 -0700 (PDT)

The so-called ``author for the email'' -- more specifically, the token that
follows the word ``From '' in an mbox-format header -- is really the ``return
address'' of whatever delivery agent wrote that message.  It may have nothing
to do with the actual sender of the message.

Pine does not use this field, nor do other mailbox formats have this field at
all.  Possibly, we could in a future copy this field in copying from one mbox-
format mailbox to another, but in all other cases (including those involving
IMAP) it is simply impossible.  I don't think that inconsistent behavior is
doing users any favors.

In a sense, it is you who wrote that message into the other folder, not the
agent who wrote it originally into your INBOX.  In mailer architectures where
there may be multiple INBOXes, this can be a significant difference.

The date in the ``From '' header isn't copied either.  This is intentional,
due to the requirement in IMAP that the internaldates be strictly ascending.

Arguably, it is a bug in the Unix ``from'' program that it reports this data
and not the address in the RFC-822 ``From:'' header line.  The from program's
usage dates back from 1970's pre-ARPAnet UNIX, where the mbox ``From '' header
was the only header and a ``network'' was UUCP and 1200-baud phone lines.

-- Mark --