headers
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz | 7 Jan 2004 19:50

Re: Inline PGP signing in a text only environment

In <87k74c6aof.fsf <at> windlord.stanford.edu>, on 12/31/2003
   at 11:37 AM, Russ Allbery <rra <at> stanford.edu> said:

>Three simple little changes would make nearly all the objections to
>MIME just disappear:

Well, those along with not posting HTML and correct handling of
code-page changes. Right now I see all to many articles in Usenet
where text was copied from an article in one character set and pasted
into an article with a different character set, without proper
translation. That's also, of course, an issue in non-MIME articles,
where people use non-ASCII characters without CT and CTE header
fields.

--

-- 
     Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
     Atid/2
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz | 11 Jan 2004 04:40

Re: Inline PGP signing in a text only environment

In <87k74c6aof.fsf <at> windlord.stanford.edu>, on 12/31/2003
   at 11:37 AM, Russ Allbery <rra <at> stanford.edu> said:

>Three simple little changes would make nearly all the objections to
>MIME just disappear:

Well, those along with not posting HTML and correct handling of
code-page changes. Right now I see all to many articles in Usenet
where text was copied from an article in one character set and pasted
into an article with a different character set, without proper
translation. That's also, of course, an issue in non-MIME articles,
where people use non-ASCII characters without CT and CTE header
fields.

--

-- 
     Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
     Atid/2
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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Bruce Lilly | 18 Jan 2004 19:28
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Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12

This is the first part of several (not sure how many; it depends on how much
time I can find here and there).

Section 2.4.3:

   Within a date-time, two of the obs-zones from [RFC 2822] are retained
   because of current widespread usage.

      zone            = (( "+" / "-" ) 4DIGIT) / "UT" / "GMT"

   The forms "UT" and "GMT" (indicating universal time) are to be
   regarded as obsolete synonyms for "+0000". They MUST be accepted, and
   passed on unchanged, by all agents, but they MUST NOT be generated as
   part of new articles by posting and injecting agents.

Much of that seems unnecessary; 2822 provides for parsing of the alphabetic
zones, including both "UT" and "GMT", and prohibits generation in new
messages.  In other words, the text above could be replaced with "see 
RFC 2822".

Section 4.1:

      header            =/ Usenet-header
      Usenet-header     = "Usenet" ":" SP Usenet-content
                             *( ";" ( Usenet-parameter /
                                      extension-parameter ) )
      Usenet-content    = <syntax specific to that Usenet-header>
      Usenet-parameter  = <a parameter specific to that Usenet-header>

What is "Usenet-header"? What are its semantics?  If this is meant to be
(Continue reading)

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Bruce Lilly | 18 Jan 2004 21:20
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Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 (part 2 of 2)

Section 8.2.2:

   3. It MUST reject any article whose Date-header is more than 24 hours
      into the past or into the future (cf. 5.1).

What about offline operation?  24 hours might not be adequate.

   12.Otherwise, when the Newsgroups-header contains one or more
      moderated groups and the article does NOT contain an Approved-
      header, the injecting agent MUST forward it to the moderator of
      the first (leftmost) moderated group listed in the Newsgroups-
      header via email. There are two possibilities for doing this:

How does the injecting agent determine which groups are moderated (esp.
if one or more of the possibly-moderated groups are not known locally)?

Section 8.6:

   2. The Subject-content (5.4) of the precursor MAY (and usually will)
      be prepended with the back-reference "Re: " (which is case
      sensitive), unless that precursor is itself a followup with "Re: "
      already present in its Subject-content; however posters MAY then
      change this before posting if they wish.  The prepended "Re: "
      SHOULD NOT be contained within any encoded-word in the new
      Subject-content.

      Followup agents SHOULD NOT use any other string except "Re: " as a
      back-reference, and specifically NOT a translation of "Re: " into
      a local language, and they SHOULD NOT prepend a "Re: " if one is
      already present.
(Continue reading)

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Charles Lindsey | 19 Jan 2004 17:11
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 (part 2 of 2)

In <400AEA97.3000004 <at> erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:

>Section 8.2.2:

>   3. It MUST reject any article whose Date-header is more than 24 hours
>      into the past or into the future (cf. 5.1).

>What about offline operation?  24 hours might not be adequate.

Injecting agents are generally not offline. If a posting agent generates
an article with some date and delays 24 hours before submitting it to the
injecting agent, then that is precisely the situation that this rule was
intended to catch.

>   12.Otherwise, when the Newsgroups-header contains one or more
>      moderated groups and the article does NOT contain an Approved-
>      header, the injecting agent MUST forward it to the moderator of
>      the first (leftmost) moderated group listed in the Newsgroups-
>      header via email. There are two possibilities for doing this:

>How does the injecting agent determine which groups are moderated (esp.
>if one or more of the possibly-moderated groups are not known locally)?

By consulting its active file. Yes, this is impossible to police 100% if
someone crossposts to some exotic group not known to the local injecting
agent, which is why there is a separate provision for each relaying agent
to repeat the check and drop the article if it has no Approved header.
Usenet is a hard place :-( .

>Section 8.6:
(Continue reading)

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Charles Lindsey | 19 Jan 2004 16:50
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12

In <400AD030.6070003 <at> erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:

Hooray! Some on topic discussion at last. Comments welcome from others.

>Section 2.4.3:

>   The forms "UT" and "GMT" (indicating universal time) are to be
>   regarded as obsolete synonyms for "+0000". They MUST be accepted, and
>   passed on unchanged, by all agents, but they MUST NOT be generated as
>   part of new articles by posting and injecting agents.

>Much of that seems unnecessary; 2822 provides for parsing of the alphabetic
>zones, including both "UT" and "GMT", and prohibits generation in new
>messages.  In other words, the text above could be replaced with "see 
>RFC 2822".

No, because we have explicitly excluded all the obs- syntax from Usefor.
So we have to say if we want to retain any of it. In fact, these are the
only two cases of the obs- syntax that are ever seen in the wild on
Usenet, but unfortunately they are still quite common.

>Section 4.1:

>      header            =/ Usenet-header

>What is "Usenet-header"? What are its semantics?  If this is meant to be 
>some sort
>of example, a text example rather than an ABNF example would be more concise
>and less confusing.
(Continue reading)

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Bruce Lilly | 20 Jan 2004 04:32
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 [4.4]

Charles Lindsey wrote:

>In <400AD030.6070003 <at> erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Section 4.4:
>>    
>>
>>  In particular, transmission paths MUST convey all headers (including
>>  body part headers and headers within message/rfc822 objects) intact,a
>>  even if they contain octets representing non-ASCII charsets.  These
>>  requirements include the transmissiom...
>>[At some point it will be necessary for the IMAP standards to catch up
>>with these requirements.]
>>    
>>
>>Several issues:
>>1. the first sentence is ambiguous -- does it mean that a header field 
>>containing
>>   the octets "=?iso-8859-1?q?foo?=" must be transmitted intact? If so, 
>>fine.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, it means that.
>
>  
>
[...]
(Continue reading)

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Bruce Lilly | 20 Jan 2004 04:40
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 [6.13]

Charles Lindsey wrote:

>In <400AD030.6070003 <at> erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Section 6.13:
>>    
>>
>>       NOTE: The presence of a Subject-header starting with the string
>>       "cmsg " and followed by a Control-message MUST NOT be construed,
>>       in the absence of a proper Control-header, as a request to
>>       perform that control action (as may have occurred in some legacy
>>       software).
>>    
>>
>>It not only "may have occurred" it is *required* by the current 
>>standard, RFC 1036.
>>    
>>
>
>And is has not been used in the wild for many years; no current news
>server implements it; no hierarchy administrator would dream of using it,
>and no news admin would accept a group created with it if he did. It is
>deader than the dodo.
>
>  
>
>>I now repeat my request of several years ago, viz. let's issue a 
>>document amending
(Continue reading)

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Bruce Lilly | 20 Jan 2004 04:50
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 [7.2.1.2]

Charles Lindsey wrote:

>In <400AD030.6070003 <at> erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Section 7.2.1.2:
>>    
>>
>>     newsgroups-line     = newsgroup-name
>>                              [ 1*HTAB newsgroup-description ]
>>                              [ 1*WSP moderation-flag ]
>>     newsgroup-description
>>                         = utext *( *WSP utext )
>>     moderation-flag     = %x28.4D.6F.64.65.72.61.74.65.64.29
>>                              ; case sensitive "(Moderated)"
>>    
>>
>>  The newsgroup-description MUST NOT contain any occurrence of the
>>  string "(Moderated)" within it.
>>    
>>
> [...]
>
>>It seems that the following would be simpler and less error-prone:
>>    
>>
>>   newsgroups-line = [ *WSP moderation-flag] 1*WSP newsgroup-name [ 
>>1*WSP newsgroup-description]
>>
(Continue reading)

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Russ Allbery | 20 Jan 2004 04:53
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Re: Comments on draft-ietf-usefor-article-12 [7.2.1.2]

Bruce Lilly <blilly <at> erols.com> writes:

> Excuse me, but this is about the *new* media type
> application/news-groupinfo. How can you talk about "existing practice"
> and "existing implementations" for something which is completely new!?!

It's intended to be backward-compatible with applications that expect the
current checkgroups format and don't understand MIME.

--

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra <at> stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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