ietf-nntp Currently outstanding issues

[Charles Lindsey]

In <87fzlkmzs9.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> The concern is headers that are folded in such a way that a line
>> contains nothing but whitespace (and in News, there is the related case
>> where the first line of the header contains nothing but the header-name
>> and the colon plus its SP). Even RFC 2822 outlaws the first of those
>> cases.

>The reason to allow folding immediately after the header name, since this
>is used in practice and lack of support for this in NNTP causes problems
>with, e.g., mail to news gateways.

I don't quite see how. If some mail has folding immediately after the
header, and it is gatewayed to news, then it needs to be unfolded to make
it legal (or else you rely on the provision in USEFOR that you SHOULD
accept it as it is).

So who is responsible for doing that unfolding? It has to be the gateway,
and surely the gateway is on the mail side of any NNTP server. So the
gateway ought to fix it _before_ calling an NNTP POST (or IHAVE) command.

But if you allow it to be POSTed still containing a header with empty
content, then it is the NNTP server that has to do the check before
entering the article in the News Database, and that is hard on the NNTP
server, because it will not be aware that this article was gatewayed from
email.

IOW, an NNTP server should be able to assume that an incoming article
conforms to all relevent Netnews standards (e.g. USEFOR), and just pass on
what it receives (escept for thing it needs to check for its own usage,
such as the msg-id perhaps).

OK, you might argue that the NNTP server obeying a POST command is an
Injecting Agent according to USEFOR, and Injecting Agents are supposed to
do rigorous checks. But that still does not apply if the gateway contrives
to use IHAVE. And I doubt that all current Injecting Agents are as fussy
on this particular point as they should be. And I think those that do spot
the problem are as likely to reject it outright as opposed to fixing it. 

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