[ietf-nntp] POST and IHAVE response codes

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Tue Dec 30 09:12:52 PST 2003


If transmission of an article fails on an IHAVE command, I see that
there are two possible responses in the event of failure:

436  Transfer failed; try again later
437  Transfer rejected; do not retry

So an article rejected for reasons of site policy would come back with
437, as in the following that I received from Berlin:

437 From: address contains invalid domain part (m.goodge at nospam.ukvoting.org.uk)

However, if the same article were to be submitted using POST, then there
is only one possible response:

441  Posting failed

which has to cover both kinds of failure (e.g. site policy and insufficient disc 
space).

That seems to me to be a Bad Thing.

It is also a Bad Thing that these two commands use entirely disparate
response codes for what are essentially the same situations, but I
suppose that is just history.

Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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