ietf-nntp Requirement for timeout close unclear

[greg andruk]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 04:25:25PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I think that Andrew's right and that the best thing to do is to simply
> drop the connection without sending anything at all.

I don't think anyone on the receiving end is doing much useful with those
responses anyay.

> Hm.  Do we have the same problem that SMTP does, namely that if the post
> is accepted but the response is lost, the client may assume that it needs
> to send it again, resulting in duplicates?

Yes, if the client does not supply its own message ID, or if it isn't
careful to use the same ID on a repost attempt.  ISTR that early versions of
Netscape (or maybe it was Mosaic) had big trouble of that kind when they
lost track of a connection.

> If so, how do we fix that?

Encourage or require clients to generate IDs sensibly?