Re: [RFC] git-format-patch: default to --from to avoid spoofed mails?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 28, 2016, 22:14 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq4m79qujr.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160728215603.GA22865@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

>> ...  What is most worrysome is the latter
>> half of the last sentence.  Is it really "should not be", or is it
>> merely "use of this option is just a waste of time, as you would get
>> exactly the same result anyway"?  If it is the latter, that is fine.
>
> It does what you want, and omits the in-body header when it would be
> redundant.

OK, then I would no longer be worried about that one.

> I think the original reason I did not make "--from" the default is that
> I was worried about breaking consumers which do not know how to handle
> in-body headers.

That's a fair concern.

So going back to Josh's original problem description:

    While git-send-email knows how to change the patch mails to use your own
    address as "From:" and add a "From:" line to the body for the author,
    any other tool used to send emails doesn't do that.

I wonder how these "any other tool" (that reads the format-patch output, i.e. mbox file with one mail per file each, and sends each as a piece of e-mail, without paying attention who you, the tool's user, are and blindly send them with the original "From:" and other headers intact in the header part of the message) are used in the wild to send patch submissions. /usr/bin/mail or /usr/bin/Mail would not be among them, as I suspect they would place everything in the body part, and the would do so without stripping the "From " line that exists before each e-mail message.