ietf-nntp POST SHOULD return an accurate response

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl8z88mcks.fsf_-_ at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>With IHAVE, generally the other server doesn't particularly care whether
>or not the article was posted, but with POST, it's actually important to
>let the client know that the article is invalid.  The exception is
>generally only for dealing with spam, where the intention is to make the
>server be deceptive to try to fool a spammer.

The wording at the end of 9.3.2 (IHAVE) was put there specifically to
cater for systems like CNews which store incoming articles in a queue and
process them later as a batch job (at which point they may decide to
reject the article as being ill-formed, or for other reasons).

I think these issues first arose when I asked why there was not similar
wording for the POST command.

Now looking at CNews again, what it does is to pass the article
immediately through its 'inews', which does various checks and may indeed
reject the article in time for the NNTP server to tell the client so.

If it passses those checks, then it goes into the same queue as the ones
that arrived via IHAVE. So it can still get rejected when the batch
process runs because there are some further tests there that were not done
by the 'inews'. Now you may say that that was bad design of CNews (for
'inews' to let through something that was going to be rejected later) and
you would be right (though the particular cases involved are pretty
obscure). So on that basis, I think you could say the CNews SHOULD do it
right (and it some obsure case slips through, then that is what "SHOULD"
is for).


>the following new text (perhaps as a separate paragraph):

>    A response of 240 SHOULD indicate that barring unforseen server errors
>    the posted article will be made available on the server and/or
>    transferred to other servers as appropriate.  In other words, articles
>    not wanted by the server SHOULD be rejected with a 411 response and
>    not accepted and silently discarded.

So I think I am agreeing with you, for the reasons stated.

>Intentionally deceptive spam filters can then be left as a conscious
>decision to not abide by SHOULD, which is explicitly allowed in the
>definition of SHOULD.

All's fair in Love and War :-) .

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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