Subject: Re: Pine, news, email, privacy

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Mercer)
Date: 21 Dec 1995 11:02:55 GMT

Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>wrote:
>On 20 Dec 1995, Jeff Mercer wrote:
>>I personally and intending on altering the source for the implimentation of
>>PINE on Alachua Freenet so that Newsgroups: lines in the header of a mail
>>message are completely ignored, which is of course RFC compliant.
>If you do that, then users won't be able to post followups when they are
>reading news.

As I said, I would alter PINE to ignore Newsgroups: lines in mail messages.
Not in news messages.
While it's not possible to detect if a message received in Email was also
posted to a Usenet newsgroup, it's fairly simple for PINE to internally know
if the user is reading a mail folder or a newsgroup.

>The correct action is to anti-false the Newsgroups: header, which has been
>done in Pine 3.92.

Is this currently available?

 [email-masked]   : All rumors are treason. Report rumors to The Computer.      
 Jeff The Riffer  :                                                             
    Drifter...    :                                                             
Homo Postmortemus :

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 22 Dec 1995 08:19:51 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>This is what I'm trying to tell you.  It isn't possible.  The best that
>you can do is a crude approximation, and there are cases in which it won't
>work.
>
>3.92 will be coming out soon; it fixes the cause of accidental postings
>and it does it right.  Why not wait until it's out.

If the best is a crude approximation, then how do you claim that it is
"done right"? 

>> >The correct action is to anti-false the Newsgroups: header, which has been

I have yet to see any definition for this term "anti-false", so I guess
you can claim it works right no matter what it does.

>However, the "to-do" list is getting shorter.  In case it isn't obvious,
>it will be a major new release.

That is why, of course, the version number is incrementing the minor
number by one instead of incrementing the major number.

---

From: [email-masked] (Michael Handler)
Date: 22 Dec 1995 19:04:45 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, Mark Crispin ([email-masked]) wrote:
> Pine 3.92 will come out Real Soon Now.  We can't make any promises yet.

Why not call it PINE 4.0, then? I've seen the list of features being
added into the new version; with that and the new anti-falsing code,
people really should upgrade from 3.91 and below to this new version.
If you call it 3.92, people may think it's only a minor upgrade, and
not bother.

-- 
Michael Handler <[email-masked]>                          Philadelphia, PA

         there's an oriented public whose magnetic force does pull /
                but away from the potential of the individual

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 12:31:16 -0800

> If the best is a crude approximation, then how do you claim that it is

Because 3.92 does not do the crude approximation based on where the
message *may* be stored.  3.92 does a better analysis of the header.

> >> >The correct action is to anti-false the Newsgroups: header

Anti-falsing refers to the rejection of a Newsgroups: header line in a
message header if the header does not otherwise conform to a standard of a
message that has been posted.  The presence of a "Path:" header is part of
the test, but not the only test.

Anti-falsing has been designed so that it errs on the side of assuming
that a message has *not* been posted (that is, that the Newsgroups: header
line is bogus).  It should never err and assume that a message was posted
when it was not.

At the same time, it preserves mail/news integration, including support of
messages that are both posted and mailed (and recognition of such).

> number by one instead of incrementing the major number.

There are several important functionalities which have been declared for
the first Pine 4, which 3.92 does not have.  Some of these, such as a
hierarchical folder browser, require IMAP4 support which won't be in 3.92
but which I expect will be in the next one after that (the IMAP4 code is
done, but there are a lot of interface changes that need to be in Pine).

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Mercer)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 09:33:59 GMT

>message *may* be stored.  3.92 does a better analysis of the header.

Erm well, that was sort of one of the things I was planning on doing.

>the test, but not the only test.

*blink blink*

I don't see why you'd need to look any further... No Path, it's not a news
message. It sure as HELL isn't a standard news message if it has no Path.
And that's all that should matter.

>line is bogus).  It should never err and assume that a message was posted

Right. 

>messages that are both posted and mailed (and recognition of such).

*sigh*

Is it at least possible for individual sites to choose whether this feature
is enabled? I personally would love to disable it for our system.

 [email-masked]   : "Yeah. Think we'll have to send his big toe to a shrink?"   
 Jeff The Riffer  :                                                             
    Drifter...    :                                                             
Homo Postmortemus :

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 19:52:40 -0800

-- Mark --

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 07:08:02 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>message *may* be stored.  3.92 does a better analysis of the header.

You told the person who was going to implement it himself that the best
he could do is a crude approximation. You told him what he wanted to do
wasn;t possible. If he can't do an analysis of the header to do it
right, why can you?

>the test, but not the only test.

SOmething that Pine should have been doing from the moment it tried to
be a newsreader.

>messages that are both posted and mailed (and recognition of such).

This is good. How do you plan on doing this? Consider that mailed copies
of posted articles often contain NO indication that they were posted,
and posted copies of articles whihc were also mailed often contain NO
indictaion that they were also mailed. You aren't, I hope, creating some
Pine kludge that puts all sorts of news headers in mail so Pine can
detect things, and then claim that every other mailer is broken because
it doesn't understand the way Pine does it, are you?

Will you support the proposed RFC for Posted-To:, and wait until it is
adopted before running off and doing it your own way?

>hierarchical folder browser, require IMAP4 support which won't be in 3.92

Funny. I have mail tools which allow hierarchical folder browsing, and
they don't know anything about IMAP.

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1995 16:31:36 GMT

In <loo-oong-message-id> Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> writes,
about getting pine to ignore the Newsgroups header in email but not
in News postings:

>It isn't possible.  The best that

Why is this so?  A number of people have been wondering for a while and
it would be useful to know why the best you can do is a crude
approximation.

>> >The correct action is to anti-false the Newsgroups: header, which has been

"anti-false" means "true", does it not?
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1995 21:21:33 GMT

In <lo-ong-message-id> Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> writes:

>line is bogus).

Mark seems to be assuming that any Newsgroups header in email is
bogus.  This assumption is incorrect.

Such a header may be considered to be bogus if it appears in email and
the email was NOT sent in response to a posting that appeared in the
newsgroups listed in the Newsgroups header.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1995 16:32:14 -0800

> the test, but not the only test.

And what about newsreaders that (correctly) let inews generate the Path:
header?

Of course we already know that Pine doesn't like working with standard Unix
software, given that it tries to take over sendmail's job and bypass the
From: rewrite rules.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])     http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~rra/

---

From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 14:01:56 GMT

>And that's all that should matter.

    Odd.  I can use IMAP to read from an IMAP4 server and get news
messages which I export to a file, which are news messages without
full headers.  I think it's also possible to save a message without
full headers, and certainly one can use tools other than Pine to save
messages which are later referred to by Pine with IMAP2bis.  I'd say
that these are still news messages even when they have no Path: header.

    Maybe you want to delve into the details of IMAP to see how the
traditional distinction between mail and news is becoming increasingly
blurred in a distributed environment.  I view Pine more as a power tool
for the latter, with its IMAP support, and I don't even use it as a
replacement for a read-the-local-spool mail or news program.  If that's
what you use it for, you're really missing out on the benefits it has
to offer.  Remember, the whole world is not NNTP and /var/spool/mail ,
and many sites are moving away from this as it fails to meet their
needs.

    I'm posting this only to comp.mail.pine .  I feel it has no real
reason to be introduced into the other groups where this thread can
be found.

-- 
 Barry Bouwsma, Mendel University Brno, Czech Republic -- I Still Have No Life
Flash!  Seeking work with computers over winter in Czech or Slovak Republic...
(or Austria, Switzerland, Germany...)    send offers to  <[email-masked]>
This sig is five lines long.  Check your newsreader configuration if you do not

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 24 Dec 1995 00:40:05 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma) writes:

>>No Path, it's not a news

>that these are still news messages even when they have no Path: header.

Minus the Path header, one gets a very nonstandard News message.
Since there is no good definition for a 'nonstandard News message',
one enters a no-man's land, which is always risky.

I believe your analysis is wrong.

1. The fact that an IMAP server gives you "nonstandard" News
   postings with incomplete headers proves nothing about News
   postings.  Rather, it proves something about the IMAP server or the
   IMAP protocol.

      The IMAP protocol as currently implemented is not suitable for
      Usenet browsing.  A client reading Usenet via IMAP may get false
      information, because the IMAP design includes no mechanism to
      distinguish between News and email.

   The workaround for this is to treat anything obtained via IMAP as
   email.  If might have been originally News, but it has been
   converted to email.  Post no followups to it.  This solves all
   problems and minimizes confusion.

   The long-term solution will be to revise the IMAP protocol so
   it can properly tell the difference.

2. In general, if a message has no Path header, it should be treated as
   email.  Post no followups to it.

The designers of IMAP may have made some fundamental errors of concept
similar to the errors made by the designers of pine.  News is not
email, and software designed to lose the information that preserves
this distinction may fail to work properly when it encounters Usenet
postings or when it encounters email messages that contain a Newsgroups
header.

BTW, I hear some people saying roughly "News vs email is a protocol
issue.  If you ignore the underlying protocol there is no distinction
between News and email."  I believe these people are missing the
distinction between lower-level transport and networking protocols
(e.g.  TCP/IP vs ISO) and high-level applications-level protocols (e.g.
UUCP vs NNTP vs SMTP) and still higher level "applications" themselves
(e.g. email vs News).  They are assuming that everything occurs at just
a single layer called 'the protocol' and that there is no difference
between News and email except for the difference at this (incorrect)
level of abstraction.

>blurred in a distributed environment.

You seem to be saying, in effect, that IMAP discards information, and
so everybody else should do the same thing.

I have seen a tendency, lately, for a number of people to say "xxx
software can't tell the difference between News and email, so there is
no difference."  This conclusion is wrong!  If xxx software cannot tell
the difference, it just means that xxx software is broken.  Ignoring
the difference does not make the difference go away.

It takes no great stretch of imagination to hear the same people saying
"xxx software can't tell the difference between protons and electrons,
so there is no difference", or "xxx software can't tell the difference
between men and women, so there is no difference", and so on.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway