16499 - Work around sendmail bug which reveals bcc recipients when all recipients are bcc

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement, P3)

Description

[slschroe]

In Netscape Mail, I would love to be able to send an e-mail message without havi
ng any addresses shown - I don't want to have to mail myself the message, then B
CC the other people I would like to send it to. I realize the point of carbon co
pying is to make a copy, but I would like there to be a way of witholding all ad
dresses.

Comment 1

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

slschroe, doesn't put all recipients in bcc isn't enough for you? If you do that, no address will be shown execpt the
sender (FROM:).

Comment 2

[lchiang]

What ducarroz suggests should do what you want:
1) New message
2) Change the recipient from To: to BCC:
3) Address your message and send

Or are you talking about something else?

Comment 3

[Phil Peterson]

Sounds to me like bcc does what you want. Marking worksforme.

Comment 4

[pmock]

changing QA assigned to myself

Comment 5

[Claus Färber]

There is a more serious problem related to this: Although Mozilla does handle
everything correctly, it triggers a stupid sendmail bug: When there's neither
a To nor CC header, Sendmail will add an Apparently-To header revealing all
envelope addresses! If the message has not yet been split up to individual
recipients (eg at the smarthost though which Mozilla delivers the mail), this
will reveal all BCC recipients.

qmail-inject has implemented a workaround to this: It adds
"CC: unlisted-recipients: ;" to the headers, which reportedly prevents sendmail
from doing that very stupid and annoying thing.

(BTW: This problem is also exploited by NS 4.x.)

Comment 6

[selmer (gone)]

Mass moving to M16 to get these off the M15 radar.  Please let me know if this
is really an M15 stopper.

Comment 7

[selmer (gone)]

This is not critical.  It would be nice for us to implement this enhancement to
workaround a server bug, but it isn't a high priority right now.  Use a to: in
your message to avoid the server bug.

Comment 8

[lchiang]

Move enhancement to future target milestone for review in a later release.  
Adding helpwanted keyword.

Comment 9

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

The solution of addressing the message to a empty address group named
unlisted-recipient cause too much problem as some mail server doesn't not
recognized it as a valid address. Therefore I choose to go the way Outlook did
by addressing the message to the sender when no recipient are disclosed.

Comment 10

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Attachment: Proposed fix, v1

If a message has only bcc recipients, the message will be addressed also to the
sended (as to).

Comment 11

[Cavin Song]

Comment on attachment 105343 [details] [diff] [review]
Proposed fix, v1

r=cavin.

Comment 12

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

Comment on attachment 105343 [details] [diff] [review]
Proposed fix, v1

sr=sspitzer

but won't this send mail the mail back to the person who sent it?

(are we ok with that?)

any thoughts about doing "Undisclosed Repients" that you sometimes see?

or is that a spammer trick?

Comment 13

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

As I said in comment #9, sending the message to an address group [Undisclosed
Repients:;] or [unlisted-recipients:;] can cause trouble with some server and
event some client as this kind of syntax (RFC822) doesn't to be fully supported!
Some server might think it's an incomplete address and automatically add a
domain to it which will result in a delivery error. That why I decided to choose
the MS Outlook solution which is 100% safe. Sure the user will get the message
back but that's a very small price to pay.

Comment 14

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

thanks for explaining it to me.

sorry for not reading the whole bug first.

Comment 15

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Fix checked in

Comment 16

[esther]

Using trunk build 20021121 on winxp, linux and max osx verifying that when the
sender only puts BCC recipients,  on Send we add the To: using the sender's
email address.  I viewed messages and they only show the To: in the addressing
field, no one except the sender sees the BCC list (but only in the copy in the
Sent folder).

Comment 17

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 180901, "Sending with only BCC recepients also sends to ME".

Comment 18

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 190192 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[Joe Infla]

*** Bug 216443 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 20

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 192275 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 187533 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***