Subject: Malformed news posting

From: Joe Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 95 10:38:15 EST

A user of pine 3.91 on our system has got automated messages from a
site in Chicago claiming his usenet posts have malformed headers for
followup messages.  We don't know what the problem is.

Unusual factors: Our news system has had history file problems, and
disk full problems.  Because of the disk full problem, the messages
that ended up getting this warning were postponed and then continued
before posting.  Could the postponing lose the information that the
posting is a followup?

I wonder why no one else is getting the same automated message.  No
one else postpones and retries?  No one else tells us?  Unknown.

Joseph Brennan     Academic Information Systems
                   Columbia University in the City of New York
                   [email-masked]

The username here has been altered to aaa999, the real name has been
omitted, and the text of the usenet post has been removed. 

                ---------------

Date: Tue, 28 Feb 1995 01:12:28 -0500 (EST)
From: [email-masked]
To: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Your malformed news posting in <[email-masked]>
Message-Id: <[email-masked]>

Tim:

I'm forwarding this on to our system administrators. 

[further text of this message omitted]

On Mon, 27 Feb 1995, Tim Pierce wrote:

>     [The following is a purely generic email message; you should not
>      receive more than one copy of this posting per week.]
> 
> Hm... I see you got mail from me about this before, but it's been over a
> week since the last one, and the problem seems to be an ongoing one, so I
> (or rather, my mindless perlbot) thought maybe you could use a reminder.
> 
> You have just posted a message (quoted below for the sake of
> reference) using a newsreader that generates incorrect message
> headers.  In particular, your followup did not contain a proper
> References: header field (see below).  While I realize that this was
> almost certainly unintentional on your part, it is still a severe
> burden, because it causes all threaded newsreaders to misbehave by
> making your article show up as a strange, out-of-sequence,
> non-threaded subject.
> 
> You should also be aware that because your news message was malformed,
> there may be gateways and transport agents out there that DROP IT ON
> THE FLOOR!  For example, the INN program, a very popular transport
> agent, has code in it which will do this if enabled.  Your messages
> may be lost!
> 
> If you manually deleted the References: line when editing, perhaps
> from Pnews or postnews, then please stop.  Otherwise, please contact
> your news administrator or service provider and carefully explain to
> them that they need to upgrade or otherwise fix the broken software
> they're having you use.  (Many BBS systems and well-known "commercial"
> service providers are currently doing this wrong.)
> 
> Considering how much news traffic there is, anything we can do to make
> it easier to read (or not read) articles would seem worthwhile.  This
> message is meant to educate, not intimidate.  If you have any
> questions regarding just what the devil I'm talking about, or perhaps
> have some input about how to make this message more informative and
> friendly, please feel free to send me direct email.
> 
> thanks,
> T.
> 
> ps: In case you (or your service provider) aren't aware of what I'm
>     talking about, the RFC (Internet standards doc) governing this is
>     1036, which is now seven years old.  I quote:
> 
> 	If the article is submitted in response to another article
> 	(e.g., is a "followup") the default subject should begin with
> 	the four characters "Re: " and the References line is
> 	required.
> 
>     AND
> 
> 	[References] is required for all follow-up articles, and
> 	forbidden when a new subject is raised.
> 
> Original message follows:
> 
> > Xref: uchinews soc.motss:245498
> > Path: uchinews!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swiss.ans.net!solaris.cc.vt.edu!spcuna!news.columbia.edu!inibara.cc.columbia.edu!aaa999
> > From: [email-masked]>
> > Newsgroups: soc.motss
> > Subject: Re: GREG LOUGANIS AND 20/20
> > Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 11:40:08 -0500
> > Organization: Columbia University
> > Lines: 97
> > Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
> > NNTP-Posting-Host: inibara.cc.columbia.edu
> > Mime-Version: 1.0
> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
> > X-Sender: [email-masked]
> > In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]> 
> > 
> > I've found the negative disussions in this thread very curious and 
> > unsettling. 
> > [ remaining text of article deleted-- just plain ascii ]
> 
> 
> -- 
> Tim Pierce
> Systems Programmer, University of Chicago
>