ietf-nntp LIST EXTENSIONS

[Ken Murchison]

Russ Allbery wrote:


> I just reviewed RFC 3501 (IMAP) and RFC 2449 (POP3) and didn't see in
> either a SHOULD-level requirement for the client to issue the CAPABILITIES
> or CAPA command.  SASL obviously requires that such a command be used
> before beginning authentication, since negotiation of the authentication
> type is part of the SASL protocol (and I should have remembered that
> earlier), but apart from that there doesn't seem to be any particular
> statement in those drafts.
> 
> SMTP is a different issue entirely since with SMTP the server returns its
> capabilities as a response to the normal client greeting.
> 
> NNTP is oddly different in that it's very common for NNTP connections to
> be unauthenticated, which is pretty much unheard of for POP.  That is more
> common with IMAP, so IMAP seems to be the closest parallel, and I can't
> find a requirement for the client to issue CAPABILITIES in the IMAP
> standard.  Maybe I'm just missing it?

You're right, its not explicitly stated in any of the doucments, I can't 
find it either (I must have misremembered), but it is implied by some of 
the language of STARTTLS and perhaps AUTH that the client has discovered 
capabilites using the command specific to the given protocol.

I'm not willing to put up a fight on this any longer, as long as the 
extension(s) in which this really is an issue addresses it.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp