Nope. Welcome to the horror that is SMTP. It was adequate for its purpose in 1982 when Jon Postel specified it, but it's a little tired these days under the weight of the more varied uses it has since been tasked to.

Just as with a paper letter, the important delivery information is on the envelope. You can write two entirely different addresses on the envelope and the letter itself. The postal service will only ever look at the envelope address and attempt to deliver the letter to that address.

Unfortunately, in the world of SMTP, delivery to a post box is considered final. At this point, most mailers consider it acceptable to discard the envelope, and most post boxes do not support envelopes anyhow. You will regularly find that lists will contain a header "To:" field of the list address itself. And yet it is in your POP3/IMAP/local mailbox. What happened was that the mail transfer agent added two "envelope" lines a "To" and a "From" line. As the mail was passed from MTA to MTA, those lines were read and the mail routed. When it got to your mailbox, they were discarded, and only the body text was written. Although there are headers that say "To:" and "From:" - notice the colons - they are simply part of the body and were not parsed by the MTAs.

The solution to dealing with this is to modify the local delivery agent of your local MTA. A typical LDA used by the Sendmail MTA is Procmail. Note that modifying the LDA to preserve the envelope reciepient has potential privacy concerns due to exposure of BCC addresses.

Does that cover it?
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DrGoon

Received from (blah) by (blah) for <user@domain.com>

... and sometimes they don't.

I know it's governed by the Header Format .cf definition (in my sendmail.cf):

$?u for $u;

... but I'm not clear why the $u macro should be undefined in some cases, or whether I'd be better switching it to $: (or $h?) instead.
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simon

A nice solution is out of my control as its cheapish shared hosting and i have no control of the mail server config : (

Last night i scanned all the headers in the mail from the mailing list server. Nothing of any use what-so ever.

As an interim fudge i got out the bandages and superglue. Adding an additional field ToAddress to the criteria this allows me to configure the system to sort the mail when a mailing list is addressed to mono-lists@ximian.org etc.

Its not perfect and removes some of the eligance, but after implementing a few checks based on recieved headers X-Delivered-To etc, the mail appears to be going where it should.

Its working ok for now, i might investigate the possibilities of creating some code that implements the SMTP protocol and bypass the pop3 server altogether.

More importantly i have to finish version two of UnFu"kWMA for decoding napster so i can burn them to my MP3 CD before i go on my hols : )

Thanks for your help

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Nic

...i might investigate the possibilities of creating some code that implements the SMTP protocol...

You'll regret that :-)
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simon