[NNTP] TLS draft question

[Ned Freed]

> Russ Allbery wrote:

> > Currently, the TLS draft says that STARTTLS may fail but the NNTP session
> > may continue.  A question has been raised as to whether this is possible
> > to do reliably, since if TLS has failed, the connection may be in an
> > indeterminate state.

> Both the client and server will know if the negotiation failed, so I
> don't think its indeterminate.

> > Are there other STARTTLS specifications that allow
> > this case?  I don't remember off-hand if the TLS working group review
> > addressed this point in particular.

> Yes.  I believe that our text follows that of IMAP, POP3 and SMTP in
> that the session may continue even if the TLS negotiation failed.

That may be the theory, but it almost never works in practice, in my
experience at least.

				Ned