[NNTP] Revisiting POST as a separate capability

[Russ Allbery]

Clive D W Feather <clive at demon.net> writes:
> Jeffrey M. Vinocur said:

>> (I mean, if we did forbid it, a server that theoretically wanted to do
>> this could simply provide hardcoded versions of READER commands that
>> return responses consistent with a server having no groups -- and a
>> client could still try to post if it wanted to.

> For that matter, just because READER (and therefore POST) isn't
> advertised doesn't stop a server implementing POST.

Right, but it means that you're not supposed to use it unless you have a
special arrangement with the server.  That means that generic software
libraries may be confused by such a negotiation, etc.

The case that actually sparked this was Mark Crispin's case of having a
post-only server and using IMAP to do all article reading, but I can think
of a number of other cases.  To take another example, the mail to news
gateway that I run for a large number of Stanford groups has no need to
read any group, but I would prefer that it post messages with POST to get
stronger syntax checking.  A third example of a client that only needs to
post but not read would be a monitoring system that keeps a trace of
alerts in a local newsgroup, another thing that we do here at Stanford.

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