Subject: Re: How to defeat posting prompt?

From: "Steven D. Majewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 14:19:04 GMT

On 21 Nov 1994, Rahul Dhesi wrote:
 
> I have to respectfully disagree about this.  When you send a private
> response to a Usenet posting, the Newsgroups: header in the private
> response tells the recipient that you are responding to a Usenet
> posting, not to a previous email message.  This is a useful function
> for a Newsgroups: header in email.  It has been this way for many years
> and it has worked well.  I don't think it is a good idea to
> retroactively declare this broken.  If authors of newer software wish
> to have a mechanism for signifying that what looks like private email
> is really intended to be a News posting, they should find something
> that is compatible with the existing news readers.  

While I think you make some good points in your post, I think it is a 
severe distortion of the facts to declare this usage some sort of 
existing de facto standard. In fact, a number of different programs - 
news readers and mail<>news gateways and others have been using both
"Newsgroups:" and "X-Newsgroups:" in inconsistant ways for some time. 

There is in fact no existing de facto agreement on the meaning of 
"Newsgroups:"  ( and even the meaning defined in rfc1036 for news messages
is too loose to be useful - thus Henry Spencer's attempt to tighten 
up and disambiguate some of those definitions in "Son of rfc1036" ) 

To imply that there has been some sort of universally accepted convention
which "newer software" is violating is a distortion of the facts. 

The reason this has NOW come to be an issue is that people (and programs)
would like to be able to determine whether something was a private reply
or a public posting, thus some standard way of labeling that would be 
useful.  Useful, but judging from the lact of consensus on what that
standard ought to be, unlikely. 

Lacking any such standard, the best a current program ( like Pine ) can
do is to indicate to the user that this message MIGHT have been a public
posting, and ask the user what he wants to do about it. It is certainly
not the program's fault if the message is ambiguous or if the user 
guesses wrong. 

-- Steve Majewski       (804-982-0831)      <[email-masked]> --
-- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics --
-- Box 449 Health Science Center        Charlottesville,VA 22908 --

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From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Nov 1994 00:09:09 GMT

In <[email-masked]> "Steven D. Majewski" <[email-masked]> writes:

>existing de facto standard.

Please!  It is not a severe distortion of facts to say what I said.
Like the man said, 'read my lips':

   When you send a private response to a Usenet posting, the
   Newsgroups: header in the private response tells the recipient that
   you are responding to a Usenet posting, not to a previous email
   message.

All the more powerful news readers have worked this way for some
years.  If they include a Newsgroups: header in private mail sent in
response to a usenet posting, this header is consistently used mean
what I said it means.   I do not know of any news reader (before pine)
that includes a Newsgroups: header in a private response to a Usenet
posting for any other purpose.  If you know of counterexamples, please
describe them.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 1994 19:02:06 -0800 (PST)

> posting for any other purpose.  If you know of counterexamples, please

Pine does NOT "include a Newsgroups: header in a private response" 
--presuming that "private response" means an *email* reply.  I think it is
clear that Pine is correct in this behavior, as it avoids the ambiguity that
everyone is concerned about. 

The issue at hand has to do with messages *not* created by Pine.  In
particular: under what circumstances users should have an opportunity to
OPTIONALLY follow-up, via news, a message sent by some *other* program that
happens to include a Newsgroups header. 

Note that the oft-repeated suggestion that Pine simply infer the correct 
action based on the transport protocol in use is, as has been mentioned 
previously, infeasible.  NNTP is not the only way to access news in Pine, 
and even if it were, there are other situations where the original 
transport protocol cannot be reliably determined.

See my previous posts for more details and possible alternatives.

-teg

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From: [email-masked] (Oh Captain)
Date: 22 Nov 1994 03:13:48 GMT

>posting for any other purpose.  If you know of counterexamples, please

All right, I personally can't think of a counterexample off hand, but gnus
might be one; I'm not so familiar with it.

In any case, the numbers of newsreaders that work this way don't affect
the fact that it is plainly and intuitively broken behavior and rampant
violation of any logical standards process.

What these newsreaders are doing is copying over headers from a replied-
to message into a format for which they are undefined.  If this copying
was happening because that module of the program didn't understand the
headers, this is ridiculous; would we want this behavior for headers
like Content-Type?  If it's for some other reason, it's equally absurd;
it preempts an undefined but potentially useful header, changing the
semantics radically from the only place such a header was and *still is
currently* defined, and using it to include metainformation not about
the message in which it occurs but about the message to which it is a
reply and the specific means by which that message was read.  This is
completely different than anything in any RFC for either email or news;
the only other thing that ever is indicated about a replied-to message
is its Message-ID, which defines a standard of encapsulation that this
*awful* behavior wrt the Newsgroups: header gratuitously breaks.

--
James Deikun
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
ObObThing: ObZumabait: wow, it's almost Turkey Day...

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From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Nov 1994 10:14:05 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Oh

>might be one; I'm not so familiar with it.

Your candor is appreciated.  We are no longer disputing the facts
(always frustrating for both sides) but opinions, and here there is
some room to agree to disagree.

>...it is plainly and intuitively broken behavior and rampant

>to message into a format for which they are undefined.

Undefined by the RFCs, but defined by practice. 

May I respectfully remind you of the xmodem file transfer protocol,
which is far more standard and ubiquituous than any RFC can ever hope
to be, and yet is defined in none.  Neither are Kermit or zmodem
defined in any RFC -- if they can be considered defined at all -- yet
that has not prevented them from being useful.

Or of SLIP, which hundreds of thousands of people fire up on their Macs
and PCs everyday, which preceded its RFC.

I understand that TCP and IP too were invented before their respective
RFCs.

Standards are meant to codify or facilitate practice, not stifle it.
Those who disagree with this will be happier on the X.400 and X.500
committees.

I have a little essay about one-eyed camels and Pharisees which I will
email to you (with or without the Newsgroups: header, as you wish)
upon request.

And don't forget that we do have an RFC which by implication requires
email software to accept the Newsgroups: header.  It's the one that
says that it should be possible to feed any valid News posting to email
software.  By implication, any email software that can't handle this
must be considered to violate this particular RFC.  (I believe it's RFC
1036.)

Furthermore, the spirit of all the mail-related RFCs is that any header
with the right format should be accepted.  The email software is not
required to *understand* a header in order to transmit it.  Some, like
the Newsgroups: header in email (as well as Subject:) are for the use
of the human reader and their semantics are of no value to the
intermediate email software.

>This is

Please do ask me about the camel.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>

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From: [email-masked] (Robert A. Rosenberg)
Date: Thu, 24 Nov 94 22:02:06 GMT

In Article
<[email-masked]>, "Steven
>not the program's fault if the message is ambiguous or if the user 

If I send an Email via the Reply-via-Email Option, the News Agent KNOWS this
is an Email Reply and can state this in a header. If I use Cc in an Article
Post, again it KNOWS this and can set a Header in the Emailed copy to
document this. I fail to see how the News Agent can be confused about the
also-posted or not-also-posted status of an Email Message it is being asked
to send. Fixing this should then help Pine since it is not getting mixed
signals as to the status of an incoming Email Message.