It does not appear that Mailman modifies the "Sender:" field to comply
with RFC 2822. The list-bounces address is not the mailbox of the agent
responsible for transmitting the message, as required in section 3.6.2.
The mailbox of the agent responsible for the transmission of the
message would be the list-owner address.
Mailman's use the "Sender:" field does not seem to be in line with the
intent of the RFC, nor with current usage of the field. The example
given in the RFC is of a secretary sending an email on behalf of someone
else. Outlook obviously interprets it this way. Some versions of
Thunderbird display both the Sender: and From: lines to the user, which
may prove confusing if the Sender: address is not a person or an obvious
alias for one. Gmail uses it if you choose a "From" address that is not
your gmail.com address.
Further, if Mailman is going to change the "Sender:" field, it should
add Resent-* headers, per section 3.6.6 of RFC 2822; otherwise, the
original sender information is lost. The RFC does say that this is to
be used when "users" reintroduce a message into the system, further
providing evidence that automated components of the mail routing system
shouldn't be changing these. (Note that MTAs don't change the Sender:
field, despite being, by their nature, agents responsible for
transmission of messages.)
RFC 2369 provides headers which are to be used by mail list software to
identify the various ways of interacting with the list, and Mailman
already adds them. This makes adding this information to the Sender:
field redundant.
Based on all of this, Mark's note that there are some MTAs which bounce
to the Sender: address is the only reason that I've seen why this
behavior should continue. Does anyone know what MTAs these are, or if
they're even still in use? If these buggy MTAs are common, I would
suggest that an option be added to the list to enable this behavior,
marked as an accomodation for buggy MTAs, and defaulting to "off". I'll
see if I can scrounge up the time to submit a patch to accomplish this,
if it'll actually get included in a future release; otherwise I won't
waste my time. If these MTAs are not in use, I stand by my original
recommendation to comment out/remove the two lines responsible for the
behavior.
At any rate, the "keep patching" suggestion is unhelpful. This is
obviously a problem that many people are running into, enough that
there's a FAQ entry about it. It should be addressed.
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