ietf-nntp Article concepts

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Mar 24 10:49:00 PST 2003


Juergen Helbing <infstar at infostar.de> writes:

> Is there a serious reason why a news-server _MUST_NOT_ (as you
> specify) an own msg-id ?
> I believe that the most serious concern would be that duplicates are
> floating around on Usenet whenever an article is forwarded without (or
> with a corrupt) msgid. 
> But is is really necessary to forbid that a news-server handles such
> articles internally - as long as it does not add such article to
> outgoing feeds ?

I agree; I think that assignment of message IDs and processing of articles
received by the server are both outside the scope of the NNTP protocol
itself.  The NNTP protocol just specifies a *wire* protocol for
transferring articles and information about articles between posts.  What
happens internally to the server between the time that some bits are
received from the client and an article is made available for reading
should be left to other standards, particularly since USEFOR already
tackled this and the previous NNTP standard didn't discuss it.

RFC 977 says:

   No attempt shall be made by the server to filter characters, fold or
   limit lines, or otherwise process incoming text.  It is our intent
   that the server just pass the incoming message to be posted to the
   server installation's news posting software, which is separate from
   this specification.  See RFC850 for more details.

and that seems like the right approach to me.

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



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