[NNTP] Re: New NNTP drafts approaching IETF Last Call

[Charles Lindsey]

In <Pine.WNT.4.63.0503240937480.1900 at Shimo-Tomobiki.panda.com> Mark Crispin <MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:

>On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>> Since I was reading it for other reasons, can I please point at RFC 2821,
>> section 2.3.1:

>The fallacy in your argument is that NNTP does not directly correspond to 
>SMTP.  NNTP is both an access and a posting protocol.  Consequently, NNTP 
>must consider the access protocols (POP3 and IMAP).  As soon as you do 
>that, the precedent of IMAP invalidates your argument.

POP3 is a protocol for managing a store of email messages and delivering
them to clients. It is therefore irrelevant to Netnews.

IMAP is a protocol for managing a store of email messages and/or news
articles and delivering them to clients.

It is not usual to access an IMAP store of news articles using NNTP,
though there is no reason why some NNTP server should not offer that
service (and internally it might or might not use the IMAP access
facilities in order to do so).

But I don't see how this affects our NNTP draft in any way, since the
structure of what is contained in a current IMAP store is a subset of what
can be delivered by an NNTP server conforming to our draft (assuming
conversions from UTF-7 to UTF-8 in the proper places).

-- 
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