Re: Kind reminder: please don't reply to and/or quote spam, ever
On Mon 20 Apr 2020 at 12:27:55 (+0200), tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 09:57:34AM +0000, Russell L. Harris wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 11:43:40AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > >>Thunderbird provides the command ":exec bounce-message".
> > >
> > >Oh, wow. Thanks for the hint. Does anyone know what that command
> > >does?
> >
> > Someone provided a detailed explaination of bounce a few messages
> > earlier in this thread. But briefly, bounce sends the message,
> > intact, complete with attachments, if any, just as if you were a relay
> > station.
>
> Oh, this was explicitly about Thunderbird's ":exec bounce-message"?
> I missed that bit, sorry for that. Will re-read.
If this is so, then : must be an active character in order to
introduce the string "exec". I see no mention of : in that role on
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts
so we need some clarification.
> > However, if you wish to make additions or modifications to the
> > message, you use forward. Forward is like a reply, except it is
> > sent to a third party, rather than back to the sender.
>
> "back to the sender" makes me unsure now: does ":exec bounce-message"
> let you choose the target, or is it just "back to sender"?
It's always seemed futile to me to bounce an entire message back to
the sender: after all, they sent it, they know what was in it, and
have probably retained a copy (if it's non-trivial).
By the time you—the user, using a MUA—receive an email, it's
rather late in the day to say that it's undeliverable because,
by definition, it's been delivered—to you.
> I understand "forward": you get to write a message and send the
> original wrapped in a MIME part, which would be OK (provided the
> receiver can handle that).
With bouncing in the sense of batting it somewhere else, I can see
its usefulness if you work within a group of cooperating colleagues,
where each is taking responsibility for different aspects.
Otherwise, forwarding seems more appropriate and polite. But there are
two forms of fowarding (at least in mutt): as a separate attachment,
or as part of your own email (like with top-posting). In the latter
case (with mutt), you can see that you're only forwarding whichever
parts of the original header that you were displaying at the time.
Whenever I reported spam/infected emails at work, I always used the
attachment mode, in order to make it clear that I had received the
email (which should have been filtered out by the servers already)
and wasn't myself spamming from an infected system.
Cheers,
David.
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