3.18 Sending messages with anonymous receivers

You may occasionally wish to send a message to anonymous receivers.

For instance, please imagine that Pooh is trying to invite multiple friends to a party. Piglet should reply only to Pooh. However, Piglet might make a mistake of replying to other people if the addresses of all the invitees are listed in Cc:. Moreover, Pooh does not want to disclose the names of those who he invited until the day of the party.

To handle this, Mew makes use of ":;" for anonymous addresses. Please look at the following example.

To: party:piglet@example.org,roo@example.org;
From: Pooh <winnie-the-pooh@example.net>

Here, there is a colon (":") after the explanatory comment "party". This is followed by some addresses that are delimited by "," and terminated by ";". If you write addresses in this format, Mew sends the message to the addresses with them removed form the header. In this example, Piglet and Roo will receive the following message.

To: party:;
From: Pooh <winnie-the-pooh@example.net>

The receiver knows that the sender is Pooh, but will not know who else received the message. Also, the string "party:;" is not address, so the receiver cannot reply to it.

You should understand that enumerating many addresses on To: or Cc: is basically not a good practice anyway. If you often have the occasion to send messages a set group of people, you should create a mailing-list.

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