Subject: Pine, news, email, privacy

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Dec 1995 01:18:08 GMT

I have just discovered, to my considerable cost and embarrassment,
that pine hasn't the simplest idea of privacy.
(I'm using 3.91 compiled for Solaris.)

I post to a newsgroup. (1)
Someone emails me concerning that post, doing a reply to me. (2)
I email a reply to them. (3)

Since they emailed me, it's now a private conversation unless
both parties agree to make it public.

So, when I send the email reply in pine, pine pops up a helpful
question. 'Do you want to post this to the newsgroups X too?'

And I say yes, because I assume that for pine to ask me, the
email I am replying to must have been both mailed and posted.

This is not the case. pine asks this seemingly helpful question anyway,
regardless of whether or not (2) was mailed or mailed-and-posted.

THIS IS THE STUPIDEST TRAP I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF FALLING INTO.

Posting private email is bad form on usenet, yet pine encourages you
to do it. I am severely peeved. I can't believe that a program as
mature as pine is can have this goddam awful behaviour.

So how do I hack the source to change this awful and dangerous behaviour?

L.

-- 
<URL:http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>netboy<[email-masked]>

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 1995 19:30:50 -0800 (PST)

In a probably futile endeavor to foreshorten yet another protracted and
pointless flame-fest on this topic, here are a few facts:

 o The root of the problem is that *some* news-reading programs put a
   Newsgroups header into *email* messages that they send via SMTP,
   which were *not* also posted via NNTP.

 o In order to accommodate the behavior of these newsreaders (which we
   feel is at *best* ill-advised), Pine 3.92 will ignore Newsgroups
   headers when deciding whether to give you the CHOICE of posting, unless
   there is also a PATH header.

 o In the meantime, you can tell procmail to delete such newsgroup headers
   in incoming email messages.

-teg

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 08:55:34 +0000 (GMT)

On Sun, 3 Dec 1995, Terry Gray wrote:

>    feel is at *best* ill-advised)

That behaviour is most certainly not ill-advised. (The newsreader in
question was rn, by which all other newsreaders are judged and many
are found lacking.)

If the reply is in response to a thread that has been crossposted to
more than one group, the Newsgroups: line could provide useful information
saying which group was being read for the response to be made, which
can influence how you in turn respond.

If newsreaders used the Newsgroups: line to indicate which group was
being read at the time, rather than just copying the line from the posted
article being replied to, we'd see a lot less spamming in newsgroups,
and a lot more newsgroup-relevant discussion as followups settled into
the most relevant group.

>    Pine 3.92 will ignore Newsgroups

A very sensible decision.

L.

Lloyd Wood, CSER Networks Group, University of Surrey, +44 1483 300800 x3435
<URL:http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>netboy<[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 05:53:50 GMT

Lloyd Wood ([email-masked]) wrote:
: I have just discovered, to my considerable cost and embarrassment,
: that pine hasn't the simplest idea of privacy.
: (I'm using 3.91 compiled for Solaris.)
: I post to a newsgroup. (1)
: Someone emails me concerning that post, doing a reply to me. (2)

Well, you see he didn't e-mail you he replied to you.

: I email a reply to them. (3)
: Since they emailed me, it's now a private conversation unless
: both parties agree to make it public.
: So, when I send the email reply in pine,

Well you did use a x-mailer mozilla (sp) not pine, but ...

: pine pops up a helpful
: question. 'Do you want to post this to the newsgroups X too?'
: And I say yes, because I assume that for pine to ask me, the
: email I am replying to must have been both mailed and posted.

Yes if it asks you that it was probably both mailed and posted, or it 
was a (r)eply from a posting of yours to a newsgroup, NOT a private 
email message, yer almost correct.

: This is not the case. pine asks this seemingly helpful question anyway,
: regardless of whether or not (2) was mailed or mailed-and-posted.
: THIS IS THE STUPIDEST TRAP I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE OF FALLING INTO.
: Posting private email is bad form on usenet, yet pine encourages you
: to do it. I am severely peeved. I can't believe that a program as
: mature as pine is can have this goddam awful behaviour.
: So how do I hack the source to change this awful and dangerous behaviour?

You don't need to hack anything, just answer (n)o rather than (y)es when 
asked 'do you want to post this ... etc'  Sheessh ... If you answer (y)es 
to the question 'do you want to post this?', what do you think may happen 
... Only a thought!  BYE.

                          /\    /~\/\/\    /\      /\  /\   |>>
John (aka DearOldDad)    /\ \/\/  / /  \/\/  \/\/\/  \/  \/\|Fore!
Pocono Mtns PA USA EARTH/__\/_/__/_/___/[email-masked]|_____

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 07:01:36 -0800 (PST)

> question was rn, by which all other newsreaders are judged and many

The newsgroups header is the RFC-defined way to specify which newsgroups a
message should be posted to.

The concept of which newsgroups a message thread originated in is an
entirely different one, and using the same header for both is "at best,
ill-advised", rn apologists notwithstanding.

Like I said, I don't want to see another extended and pointless argument
about this, so I'll stop now, and we can agree to disagree.  Since Pine
3.92 will include a work-around for the rn behavior, the issue is moot.

-teg

---

From: [email-masked] (Eli Brandt)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 17:14:03 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Paul O Bartlett  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>    Calm down.  All you have to do is answer 'no' when Pine asks you 
>whether you want to reply to the newsgroup also.  Probably the original 
>response you got had a newsgroup header in it -- that's the sender's 
>problem -- so Pine is actually doing you a favor of allowing you to make 
>a choice.

"Do you want to blow away your inode table too? (Y/N)"

Sure, it's the user's fault.  But it's Pine's fault too.  I've seen
enough people bitten by this feature that I have to consider it a
design bug.  You don't have to be totally clueless to make the
mistaken assumption that the program knows what it's doing.

I don't understand why Pine feels the need to ask this question.  A
Newsgroups: header is no indication that the message was mailed-and-
posted -- unfortunately, there is no standard way to indicate this,
AFAIK.  And unintended privacy is a much better failure mode than
unintended publicity.  If you're a Pine user, how often do you answer
"yes" to this question, or have you turned it off?

Not having used Pine, I may be off base: if this feature is off by
default and gives a warning on activation, the user has only himself
to blame.

--
   Eli Brandt
   [email-masked]

---

From: James Black <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 15:07:18 -0500 (EST)

Hello,

> mistaken assumption that the program knows what it's doing.

  As a frequent user of pine I have gotten used to thinking before 
answering yes, and I usually say no if I am not sure, so that privacy is 
protected.  Regardless what you do some people will complain as the 
computer should be psychic, and it is not.  My second rule of programming 
is: Computers are stupid (Rule 1 is KISS).
  Just my $0.02, but when asked a question think and don't assume.  Take 
care and have fun.

==========================================================================
James Black (Comp Sci/Comp Eng sophomore)
e-mail: [email-masked]
http://www.eng.usf.edu/~black/index.html
**************************************************************************

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 Dec 1995 09:40:24 -0800

>3.92 will include a work-around for the rn behavior, the issue is moot.

I also don't want to get into another discussion about this.  If you
are interested in helping to come up with a set of message headers that 
will be meaningful to both mail and news user agents, please read
comp.mail.headers and consider joining the mailnews-l mailing list.
Information about that list is at:

   http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/mailnews.html

Thanks,
Nancy

-- 
<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<*<
            @..@            Nancy McGough           /\_/\
           (----)           Infinite Ink           ( o.o )
          ( >__< )    http://www.jazzie.com/ii/     > ~ <

---

From: Nancy McGough <[email-masked]>
Date: 4 Dec 1995 09:29:09 -0800

>   in incoming email messages.

Here's a procmail recipe that should work to do this:

:0 fhw
* ^Newsgroups:
* ! ^Message-Id:.*Pine
| formail -R Newsgroups: X-Originated-In-Newsgroups:

I have lots of info about setting up and using procmail at:

  http://www.jazzie.com/ii/internet/procmail/

Good luck,
Nancy

---

From: [email-masked] (Michael Handler)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 02:58:36 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, 
> mature as pine is can have this goddam awful behaviour.

Mark Crispin and the PINE team: here is _yet_another_ example of how
PINE's misinterpretation of the Newsgroups: header in a _private_
email message has caused someone great harm and chagrin. How much
longer can you continue to insist that this behavior should not be
changed?

In the meantime, I'd like to propose a new verb.

pine, v. [1] To _accidentally_ post a response to a correspondent's
_private_ email to Usenet, especially due to an exceptionally stupid
behavior in a mail reader. [2] To have a response to your private
email posted to Usenet, as per definition 1.

The similarity of the effects of the actions this word describes, to
being hit on the head with an actual pine cone, is intended.

Usage:
* "Oh, man! David just _pined_ me again!"
* "Laura's not talking to me any more, after I _pined_ her mail about
   her fantasies back to alt.sex.spanking."
* "AAAAAUGH! I _pined_ my message where I said what I really thought
   about my boss to our internal newsgroups! I'm going to go hunt down
   Mark Crispin and beat him with a rubber hose!"

> So how do I hack the source to change this awful and dangerous behaviour?

Alan Jaffray <[email-masked]> provided this patch a while back. I
haven't had a chance to hack it into the PINE at netaxs.com, so I'm
not 100% sure if it will work, but I trust Alan.

Needless to say, I've started editing out the Newsgroups: header on
anyone I email now...

I'm starting an archive of patches to PINE to fix this problem. If you
have any others, please mail them to me. I'll make them available via
FTP and WWW.

=====CUT HERE=====
*** pine3.91/pine/reply.c       Thu Oct  6 17:14:17 1994
--- pine3.91/pine/reply_sane.c  Tue Mar 21 01:06:14 1995
***************
*** 208,220 ****
        }
  
        /*
!        * If we haven't asked before, and we're replying to one
!        * messsage (an agg reply in a non-news folder may not have
!        * newsgroups in all the members or even different news
groups)
!        * or an agg reply in a news folder, and the envelope has a
!        * newsgroup, ask if the user is posting a follow-up article.
         */
!       if(!ret && (totalm == 1L || IS_NEWS(pine_state->mail_stream))
           && env->newsgroups && env->newsgroups[0]
           && (ret = want_to(NEWS_PMT, 'n', 'x', NO_HELP, 0, 0)) == 'y'){
            /*========= Follow up to a news group ============*/
--- 208,218 ----
        }
  
        /*
!        * If we haven't asked before, and we're replying to a message
!        * in a news folder, and the envelope has a newsgroup, ask if
!        * the user is posting a follow-up article.
         */
!       if(!ret && IS_NEWS(pine_state->mail_stream)
           && env->newsgroups && env->newsgroups[0]
           && (ret = want_to(NEWS_PMT, 'n', 'x', NO_HELP, 0, 0)) == 'y'){
            /*========= Follow up to a news group ============*/
=====CUT HERE=====

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

                                sweet and low

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 5 Dec 1995 00:52:08 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>message should be posted to.

You might want to step back a moment and note that the RFC which defines
"newsgroups" as a header applies only to news, and not to mail. In mail,
"newsgroups:" is undefined.

>ill-advised", rn apologists notwithstanding.

Using the Newsgroups header for ANYTHING in mail is, "at best,
ill-advised". Putting it in is no worse than, an probably not as bad as,
assuming that it means something that it doesn't.

>3.92 will include a work-around for the rn behavior, the issue is moot.

I am glad to see the pine team accepting that it is a problem and doing
something about it. I hope they will be quick to support and adopt the
proposed RFC which does clear up this mess.

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 22:59:24 -0800

Michael Handler:

Before you post any further personal attacks on individuals, you would be
well-advised to ensure that your attacks are directed at the right
individual.  I did not write the reply code in Pine.

Most vendors do not read or respond to USENET postings in the newsgroup
dedicated to their product.  The staff members that once did so got tired
of being the brunt of personal attacks.  The attacks were often for no
reason other than they took the time to respond and explain things, and
thus became visible targets.

If the readers of comp.mail.pine would rather have silence than risk
getting an answer that they don't want to hear, I'll be happy to
unsubscribe and no longer answer questions.

But before I leave: that patch will disable follow-ups if you save a news
message to a folder for later reference and then access that folder.  Some
people do that, particularly if they want to compose a follow-up offline.
So be sure to tell them that you are breaking it before you install that
patch.

> --- pine3.91/pine/reply_sane.c  Tue Mar 21 01:06:14 1995

-- 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: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Dec 1995 13:17:59 GMT

>email posted to Usenet, as per definition 1.

And I would like to add a new meaning to the word 'oPine'.

   oPine, v. To express an opinion in a commanding tone.
   E.g.: "please ignore Dhesi" he oPined.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Scott Charles Glowicki)
Date: 5 Dec 1995 14:53:34 -0500

*SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*  *SNIP*

: Posting private email is bad form on usenet, yet pine encourages you
: to do it. I am severely peeved. I can't believe that a program as
: mature as pine is can have this goddam awful behaviour.
: 
: So how do I hack the source to change this awful and dangerous behaviour?
Why not try answering 'no' to the question...that way it will only be 
e-mailed directly to the person and not to the person and the newsgroup!

scott
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
= Scott C. Glowicki                     [email-masked]        =
= CIS Major     Delta College        http://www.delta.edu/~scglowic     =
= University Center, Michigan     "Helloooooooooooooooooooooooo Nurse!" =
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 5 Dec 1995 08:02:30 GMT

Terry Gray ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In a probably futile endeavor to foreshorten yet another protracted and
: pointless flame-fest on this topic, here are a few facts:
:  o The root of the problem is that *some* news-reading programs put a
:    Newsgroups header into *email* messages that they send via SMTP,
:    which were *not* also posted via NNTP.
:  o In order to accommodate the behavior of these newsreaders (which we
:    feel is at *best* ill-advised), Pine 3.92 will ignore Newsgroups
:    headers when deciding whether to give you the CHOICE of posting, unless
:    there is also a PATH header.

Yo! Terry ... geeezzz ... don't change an otherwise great program just 
because a few people don't know how to use it, or because some server 
sold them some other mailer or newsreader ...

:  o In the meantime, you can tell procmail to delete such newsgroup headers
:    in incoming email messages.

Uuhhhmmm ... duhhhh ... hello, most don't know what a procmail is, but
many of us do occasionally rtfm on pine's stuff and know how to use pine
as an e-mail program, and so what he hell, it's not the best newsreader in
the world but PLEASE (or should I have said *please*) don't mess around
with the best e-mail program to 'try to accomodate' the behavior of other
newsreaders.  Only my 895 cents worth (plus tax).  Remember pine is not 
elm, and pine is not tin, and pine is not gates, and pine is not 
netscape, and pine is not whatever, add your own ending, but what PINE 
is, is the best email program ever, and thanx to y'all at at 
washington.edu I hope you will not lose sight of that fact.  G'Day.

Flames are welcome, better yet send firewood, it's cold here. ;-)

                          /\    /~\/\/\    /\      /\  /\   |>>

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Dec 1995 07:49:21 GMT

>message should be posted to.

News vs email confusion.

There is no RFC-defined way to specify to which newsgroups email should
be posted.

>about this, so I'll stop now, and we can agree to disagree.

The trouble is that there is not only disagreement about how things
'should' be, but about how they actually are.  Example:  Your comment
about RFCs, which would lead readers into believing that there is some
RFC that requires that email with a Newsgroups header should be posted
to Usenet.

It's ok to agree-to-disagree about things that are a matter of opinion,
but it makes no sense to agree-to-disagree about simple matters of
fact, such as 'there is no such RFC'.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 20:14:46 -0800 (PST)

Rahul,
Thanks to both you and John S. for pointing out to me that the Newsgroups
header is defined in the news RFCs, not the email RFCs... but since I've
been involved in Arpanet/Internet messaging for over 20 years now, I think
I knew that already.

Now see if you can think of a model in which the *news* RFCs might be
relevant to a tool that was about to send a message out *somewhere* and
ALL it had available for deciding *where* and WHICH PROTOCOL(S) to use,
were the headers in the message it was given.

Over and out...

-teg

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 5 Dec 1995 07:41:59 GMT

>   which were *not* also posted via NNTP.

*Ugh*  There they go, blaming everybody else again.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 6 Dec 1995 07:12:36 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>were the headers in the message it was given.

It was not "given" a message. It was told to locate the message in the
user's mailbox. It contains "Received-By:" headers. It doesn't contain
a Path: header. Gosh, it can't be news, it's missing a mandatory
header.  It contains mandatory mail headers, and it came from a
mailbox, so maybe ... it's MAIL?

>Over and out...

%SYS-F-PROWORD Illegal use of prowords - contradictory.

Now imagine a model where the headers are defined which will identify
the transprot a message arrived via, and whether replies should be sent
via mail or news or both or neither. Have you joined mailnews-l yet?

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 5 Dec 1995 13:53:38 GMT

Mark: the reason people beat up on you about the behaviour of Pine is simply
because you so aggressively defend it. If you don't want people to identify
you with this brokenness, then stop promoting it.

It's obvious by now that whether or not you wrote the code you would have
written code with the same behaviour.

Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:
> message to a folder for later reference and then access that folder.

Good. Since PINE doesn't tag messages in folders with their origin, that is
the correct behaviour. If you want PINE to be able to handle this case
differently, then have it add an extra header for that purpose.

	X-Pine-Origin: news
	X-Pine-Origin: mail

Courtesy copy emailed.
-- 
Peter da Silva    (NIC: PJD2)      `-_-'             1601 Industrial Boulevard
Bailey Network Management           'U`             Sugar Land, TX  77487-5013
+1 713 274 5180         "Har du kramat din varg idag?"                     USA
Bailey pays for my technical expertise.        My opinions probably scare them

---

From: Susan Farrar <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 09:58:27 -600 (CST)

Hello Folks,

I'm new to both Unix and Pine, having inherited a Unix SCO system when an 
employee abruptly left.  I noticed from the discussion on this list that 
it appears to be possible to get USENET news access with Pine.  Could 
someone point me to a FAQ on this or other docs?  

thanks in advance,
susan

_____________________________________
Susan Farrar, Manager
Academic Computing Services
Roosevelt University
(312) 341-3890 Voice
(313) 341-3858 Fax

---

From: "Brian P. Hampson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 09:55:11 -0800 (PST)

> someone point me to a FAQ on this or other docs?  

Noticed from your header that you are using PINE3.89 The latest version 
is 3.91 which allows news reading and writing.

B.

   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
   |Brian P. Hampson                  Internet: [email-masked]      |
   |System Administrator,                                                 |
   |Analytical Service Labs           Fidonet : Brian Hampson 1:153/733   |
   |Vancouver, BC                                                         |
   |+604-253-4188                                                         |
   |               Specialists in Environmental Chemistry                 | 
   |                                                                      |
   ------------------http://www.asl-labs.bc.ca/----------------------------

---

From: "Steven D. Majewski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 02:12:13 -0500 (EST)

> There is no RFC-defined way to specify to which newsgroups email should

Well - there are two RFCs that define *message* formats for "Internet
Messages" (822) and "Usenet Messages" (1036), and a couple of other
ones that define various mail and news *transport* protocols. 

It states quite clearly that rfc1036 tries to be compatible with
rfc822. I'm quite sure that if the authors of 822 had known about
1036, they would have mandated a reciprocal compatibiility - however,
*somebody* had to come first. 

> RFC that requires that email with a Newsgroups header should be posted

  No - you're correct that there is no requirement that at message
with a Newsgroups: header must be posted. However, the RFC does
define that IF a message with such a header does ever manage to 
find it's way into the usenet news environment, then the Newsgroups:
header states which newsgroups it should, in fact, be posted to.
( I'm useing the vague term "usenet news environment" - however,
actually no such environment is defined in 1036. The News Transport
Protocol (NNTP) is defined in a separate document (977). 1036 does
have a brief discussion of using email as a news transport, but 
they suggest, that to avoid confusion, the news headers and message
be encapsulated. )
 
  Ok - I know Rahul knows all these numbers.  However, he seems to
remember them quite selectively, and it's convenient for his argument
to forget that the layering of protocols and the separation of 
concerns is one of the basic design principles of the internet. 

Message Format and Transport Mechanism are two totally separate
concerns. Saying you have to know the context of one to interpret 
the other makes about as much sense as saying that you can't read
this message correctly unless you know whether it happened to 
travel by Ethernet, T-3, ATM or PPP to reach you. 

Rahul woule like zip codes to mean one thing to the U.S. Postal
Service, and another thing to UPS, and then, if someone found
his letter lying on the ground and posted it for him, he would
complain because they didn't correctly guess which transport
he had intended. The only way to construct a rational world
is for addresses to always mean the same thing at all times. 

---|  Steven D. Majewski   (804-982-0831)  <[email-masked]>  |---
---|  Computer Systems Engineer          University of Virginia  |---
---|  Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics  |---
---|  Box 449 Health Science Center    Charlottesville,VA 22908  |---
 [ "The grass is always greener, except at t=0" - Stan Kelly-Bootle ]

---

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 17:46:59 -0500

On Thu, 7 Dec 1995, Steve Summit wrote:

: In <[email-masked]>, you wrote:
: >     [...]   All you have to do is answer 'no' when Pine asks you 
: > whether you want to reply to the newsgroup also.  Probably the original 
: > response you got had a newsgroup header it it -- that's the sender's 
: > problem -- so Pine is actually doing you a favor of allowing you to make 
: > a choice.  [...]
: 
: [...]                                            Do you know if
: Pine can be configured (without recompiling) to *not* ask this
: question at all, but rather assume a "no" (i.e. mail only, do not
: post) response?  Since many people seem to dislike the feature,
: and many users seem to accidentally answer the question
: inappropriately, it seems to me that making it configurable would
: satisfy Pine's critics while leaving the dual reply/post
: functionality available for those who prefer it.

    To the best of my knowledge, Pine is *not* configurable in this
particular way without modifying the source code and recompiling.  The
Pine Development Team may be working on something like this, but I cannot
speak for them.  (The current Pine version is 3.91.)

    As I mentioned in my response, prior to actually sending any
email/post/reply/whatever, the sender does have full access to the
destination headers, but I admit that this does put the burden on the
individual to look before sending.  I have simply gotten into the habit
of doing so and glancing at the header fields before pressing the magic
send keys.

    For example, to respond to your message, Pine asked me whether I
wanted to reply to newsgroups.  When I said yes, it did not formulate a
header to send this to you also by email.  I had to add that back in by
hand, a feature which I myself find irksome in another way.  I have simply
learned to live with it in order to get other desirable features of 
Pine.  Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world.

Paul
--------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett         <[email-masked]>
P. O. Box 857     Vienna, VA 22183-0857     U.S.A.
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key
     URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart     
--------------------------------------------------

---

From: Sam Liddicott <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 12:46:31 GMT

Well spoken answer; as pine sees no harm in inventing extra headers - so a
message can be "marked" as New, when old, and so that standard mail
checkers don't report it as actually being new, why not, when saving mail,
invent a header reporting the nature of the folder collection it came
from. 

Thus news postings saved into other folders can be automatically 
identified by pine, as having actually come from news.

--
Sam Liddicott                  |   Nothing I say is to be attributed as
Campbell Scientific Ltd.       | a company statement or representation.
14-20 Field Street, Shepshed,  *---------------------------------------- 
Leicestershire,                             Phone: +44 (0) 1509 601141
United Kingdom. LE12 9AL                    Fax:   +44 (0) 1509 601091

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Dec 1995 09:41:30 GMT

>*somebody* had to come first. 

The general philosophy you state sounds nice, but the conclusions you
have drawn from it are not good ones.  At the risk of deafening
readers, let me yell this out:

   I VERY MUCH DOUBT THAT ANY OF THE AUTHORS OF THESE RFCS EITHER
   INTENDED, OR WOULD HAVE INTENDED, FOR A NEWSGROUPS HEADER IN EMAIL
   TO MEAN 'POST TO USENET'!!!

Such use for a Newsgroups header is an aberration of recent invention.
Please do not blame any of the RFCs for what is, ultimately, a software
bug.  I am sure that had any of the authors of the RFCs realized that
they would be quoted to support the broken software behavior that we
are discussing now, they would have rushed to add appropriate
disclaimers to their RFCs.

>header states which newsgroups it should, in fact, be posted to.

What RFC makes such a convoluted, hypothetical, and nonsensical
assertion?  I find no such assertion in rfc1036.  I do see that it
says:

    However, it should always be possible to use a tool expecting an
    Internet message to process a news message.

Which only means that it should be possible to feed to a mail-handling
program a News posting and expect it to do something reasonable -- such
as, for example, mail it to somebody whose address must also be
supplied.

But rfc1036 nowhere says the opposite, i.e., that it makes any sense to
feed an email message to a News program and expect anything useful to
happen.  They could have said this and made their statements
symmetrical.   They did not.  Case closed.

   THE RESULT OF FEEDING EMAIL TO A NEWS-HANDLING PROGRAM IS NOT 
   DEFINED BY THE RFCs.

>concerns is one of the basic design principles of the internet. 

Er, I am quite happy to separate message formats from transport
protocols.

The News vs email distinction is not a protocol-dependent issue at
all.  If you gave me sufficient money, I would happily implement
a software suite that would:

     Transport email via nntp and eventually deliver it into your mailbox.

     Transport News via smtp and eventually cause it to be installed in
     your News spool directory.

The distinction between email and news exists regardless of how they
are transported.  It is merely a matter of convenience that observing
that nntp is being used lets us quickly determine that News is being
transported.  In the UUCP world, both News and email are transported
via the identical UUCP mechanism -- the only difference is in which
command is executed at the other end, whether rmail or rnews, to accept
and process the transported data.  And yet, I have not seen UUCP users
get confused about whether something is News or email, and they don't
go crazy and begin posting email to Usenet under some pretence of 'got
to separate the transport from the message'.

>he had intended.

I am so glad I am alive, because presumably if you came across my dead
body, you would get my address from my wallet and try to stuff me into
the nearest mailbox.  Or worse, get my telephone number and grind me
into sufficiently fine particles that could be stuffed into a telephone
handset.   Or even worse, get my email address, really grind me into
fine pulp, and try to pour it between the keys on your keyboard.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Dec 1995 11:21:32 GMT

In <loo-ong-message-id> [email-masked] (Terry Gray) writes:

>but since I've

Dear Terry,

Your extensive experience does not help readers understand your
ambiguous statements any better.

>were the headers in the message it was given.

Which protocol is used will usually be a site-specific question.  In
fact some sites will send News via UUCP to some other sites and via
nntp to some other sites and perhaps via an email gateway to yet other
sites.  To say nothing of leaf node sites that often use offbeat
protocols such as QWK packets.  The selection of protocol is based not
on News message headers, but rather, based on the destination site.

I suppose you might want to rely solely on message headers to decide if
it's News or email, but that too seems unwise.  If you *have* to do so
I suggest looking for a Path header.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 8 Dec 1995 10:26:41 GMT

In <loo-oong-message-id> Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> writes:

>On 8 Dec 1995, Peter da Silva wrote:
>> So all the while he's been publicly denying that there's a problem he's been
>> working on fixing it.

>You don't use Pine, and based entirely on hearsay you complained about a
>problem which does not exist and can not exist in any released version of
>Pine.

Without taking either side, let me present an excerpt from a posting
by Mark Crispin that appeared on Usenet on March 8, 1995:

   The gist of the technical issue is this: there is no reliable way to
   determine what is "news" and what is "mail" to establish modal
   behavior.  If there is anyone who in sincerely interested in the
   technical details, I will be happy to explain.

   There have been a great number of suggestions on how to deal with
   the problem, for which we are grateful; unfortunately some of these
   are infeasible due to technical considerations.  We have already
   deployed several of the feasible suggestions.  These will be in Pine
   3.92.

   We are also actively investigating certain others, including a
   clever means (if it works -- not yet verified) of distinguishing
   between non-posted email from tin (et al) and postings.  It isn't
   yet certain whether this will be in 3.92; the jury is still out on
   whether or not the particular trick in question will work.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Paul Phillips)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 16:38:56 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> 
Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:
>    If you don't want your response to be posted to a newsgroup, you can 
>always say no.  And IN ANY CASE, you have complete manual control over 
>newsgroup-posting and email-sending headers before you dispatch the 
>message.  Please don't blame Pine because you are not taking the trouble 
>to check the headers before sending to see that what you want gets done.

Um, Pine is absolutely at fault here.  I didn't know there was anyone
that contested this.  It makes absolutely no distinction between email
replies to a post and posted replies to a post copied to email -- how
is one supposed to know whether to say 'no' or not?

>Pine is a good product.  Learn how to use it effectively before 
>ventilating your pique in public.

Pine is a good mailer.  It also has an enormous user interface bug that 
this person rightfully pointed out.

 -PSP

-- 
"If you have a right, you have the right to force others to get it for you, 
 and to amplify it."
    -- Michael John Falkner, philosopher to kings
       alt.current-events.net-abuse

---

From: Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 09:50:34 -0500

> (I'm using 3.91 compiled for Solaris.)

  Yes, it does, provided you learn how to use it effectively.

    Calm down.  All you have to do is answer 'no' when Pine asks you 
whether you want to reply to the newsgroup also.  Probably the original 
response you got had a newsgroup header it it -- that's the sender's 
problem -- so Pine is actually doing you a favor of allowing you to make 
a choice.  Is the cutler to blame if the surgeon is clumsy with the 
knife?  Pine is a good product.  Learn how to use it effectively before 
ventilating your pique in public.

Paul

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 20:54:31 GMT

>ill-advised", rn apologists notwithstanding.

So it's ill-advised.  You know something?  It's too late.  It's an
ill-advised feature which has become part of over a decade of
Usenet software tradition.  When you send a reply via private mail
to a public message, the private reply has a "Newsgroups" header.
I would have expected a 20-year veteran of ARPAnet/Internet
messaging software to be aware of this in advance.

You cannot hope to reverse such a thoroughly entrenched convention
as this one simply by saying "we don't like it."  Any programmer
with an ounce of sense knows that, and the PINE team's obstinacy
in this regard continues to mystify me.

>3.92 will include a work-around for the rn behavior, the issue is moot.

Well, I'm eager to continue an extended and pointless argument
about it, and I don't think the issue is moot.

You guys wrote a bug.  That's all -- end of story.  (How do I know
it's a bug?  Because it is a feature that is frequently and
consistently misunderstood by people at all levels of expertise:
newbies, net veterans, computer neophytes, PINE wizards, and
everyone in between.  That is practically the very definition of a
user interface bug.)

An important part of responsible and skillful software design is
knowing when you've fucked up.  Fucking up infrequently is a good
trait, and being able to fix your fuck-ups when they occur is
critical, but you also need to be able to recognize and admit to
your fuck-ups.

In this case, you are so insistent upon not admitting that you've
fucked up -- some bizarre, misplaced sense of pride? has Crispin
laid an Arrogance Field upon you all from which you are powerless
to escape? -- that you've allowed your fuck-up to persist for over
a year, to nobody's gain and everybody's loss.  Even when it comes
to the point where you cannot help but fix the fuck-up, it is more
important to you that people not believe it was actually your
fuck-up.  The idea that it was rn's fuck-up is ludicrous.

This is the very worst behavior that I have seen from a design
team in years.  You guys should go work for Netscape or something.
You really expect people to trust your software with their private
communications?

No, Terry.  The point is most definitely not moot.

-- 
By sending unsolicited commercially-oriented e-mail to this address, the 
sender agrees to pay a $100 flat fee to the recipient for proofreading 
services.

---

From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Dec 1995 11:55:39 +0000 (GMT)

On 4 Dec 1995, Michael Handler wrote:

> email message has caused someone great harm and chagrin.

    Well.  I just had the *opposite* problem.  I *wanted* to post a
follow-up to a newsgroup, based on an e-mail copy I had sent myself of an
article which I had posted to Usenet.
    The e-mail copy was sent to my mailbox which I access with IMAP.  It
contained the Newsgroups: header.

    For the life of me, I could not get Pine to ask me if I wanted to
post to the newsgroup, much less to ask if I could confirm that thousands
of readers might be reading the message and killfiling me, and I'd be
costing hundreds of not hundreds of thousands of dollars, so do I really
want to post this.

    It seems that I had the behaviour everyone has been clamoring for,
but that's not what I wanted.  What have I done wrong?

    I was using 3.91 on SGI, the message in the IMAP mailbox arrived with
From:, cc:, Reply-To:, and Newsgroups: -- Pine ignored the last of these
and only asked questions based on the first three.

    Sigh...

Barry Bouwsma
MZLU v Brně, ČR (Czechistan)
<[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 19:05:49 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Paul O Bartlett  <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Is the cutler to blame if the surgeon is clumsy with the 
> knife?

If Pine was only intended for use by surgeons, it'd be OK of the handle
was sharpened. But it's not...

> ventilating your pique in public.

Pine is intended to be used by naive users. It should be designed to not
surprise them.

---

From: [email-masked] (Michael Handler)
Date: 4 Dec 1995 19:26:55 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, 
> default and gives a warning on activation, the user has only himself

The feature is always enabled -- there is no configuration option to
disable it.

This whole mess comes because PINE also tries to be a newsreader, and
the code for the two functions is so tangled together that they can't
stop this functionality for mail without adversely affecting
newsreading. Or somesuch other lame excuse.

                                sweet and low

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Dec 1995 20:17:44 -0800

Good question.  The short answer is that it's a deficiency in IMAP2.
IMAP4 can fix it, and a workaround can be done with IMAP2.  But nobody has
been interested in doing the work in Pine 3.92.  I don't know when it will
be done.

However, you may be screwed anyway, depending upon the vagaries of your
email transport; if it changes things so that the Newsgroups header
appears to be false, then it won't be recognized.

On 9 Dec 1995, (ISO-8859-2) krem¾ská HOØÈICE wrote:

> MZLU v Brnì, ÈR (Czechistan)
> <[email-masked]>
>
>
>

-- Mark --

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 8 Dec 1995 02:04:58 GMT

> you with this brokenness, then stop promoting it.

I Cced Mark, and during the exchange of messages he called me all sorts of
interesting names. More to the point, though, he told me that:

	1. They have been discussing how to deal with this problem since
	   last November.

	2. The final changes were made, by Mark, in March.

So all the while he's been publicly denying that there's a problem he's been
working on fixing it. That they've been so careful in designing the fix is
admirable, but why they have been publicly so adamantly opposed to admitting
they have a problem that everyone, including themselves, can clearly see?

I honestly can't imagine what their motivation could possibly be. This sort
of public-relations stonewalling is the sort of thing you associate with
corporations like Intel and Microsoft, not volunteer freeware authors.

I will, of course, refrain from directly quoting Mark's private email without
permission.

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Dec 1995 01:52:53 GMT

In <[email-masked]> Tim Pierce

>messaging software to be aware of this in advance.

There is actually another subtle point here.

The Newsgroups header has *never* meant 'post this to these
newsgroups', not even when used in News postings.

Once a decision to post has been made, then the list of newsgroups will
be obtained either from the Newsgroups header or from the Followup-to
header if it exists, as appropriate.  In the case of control messages,
the software may perform some mapping between what a Newsgroups header
says and where the posting actually goes.  (E.g., the Newsgroups header
might say comp.mail.pine.ctl but the posting might go to comp.mail.pine
and/or to control and/or to control.cancel.)

To emphasize again, the Newsgroups header is *never* a request to
post.  I am making a distinction here between a command such as 'please
post' and data such as 'here is a list of newsgroups that may be
used'.

The request to post must occur via some other mechanism:

   - Piping something to inews is a request to post.
   - Using the POST command as nntp client is a request to post.
   - Using the IHAVE command as nntp peer is a request to post
     (really request to propagate).
   - Using a follow-up command in a news reader is a request to post.

Contrariwise:

   - Using a reply command is never a request to post, not even when in
     a news reader (use the follow-up command instead).
   - Using a reply command is never a request to post when in a mail reader.
     *** Pine authors please note. ***
   - The mere presense of a Newsgroups header in anything (whether email
     or News) is never a request to post.
     *** Pine authors please note. ***
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Dec 1995 01:39:10 GMT

In <loo-oo-ng-message-id> Paul O Bartlett <[email-masked]> writes:

>hand, a feature which I myself find irksome in another way.

In all fairness, let's note that making it hard for you to duplicate
via email a Usenet posting is desirable behavior.  Only a very small
fraction of Usenet users want their mailboxes to be cluttered with
isolated fragments of Usenet discussion threads.  Those who wish to
save selected postings can do so themselves -- you or I are not in any
position to guess which specific Usenet postings others wish to save.

Those who wish to receive entire newsgroups by email have already made
such arrangmenets and no help should be required from the rest of us.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 00:35:54 -0800

We were working on the real problem -- in fact we had solved it -- but you
and your coherts kept on bringing up this nonexistant problem

> corporations like Intel and Microsoft, not volunteer freeware authors.

You were never stonewalled.  You were told what the facts were.  You
choose to ignore them.

You even harassed me about this on alt.sys.pdp-10, of all inappropriate
newsgroups!

Perhaps the next time that you think that you are not being answered, you
should try listening.

-- Mark --

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 21:37:15 -0800

On Sun, 10 Dec 1995, Tim Pierce wrote:
> In article <[email-masked]>, kruise <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >I'm getting sick of
> >all the bitching about Pine going on in this group.  If you don't like it
> >switch to something else!
>
> Sad to say, I can't seem to persuade everyone who's posting
> excerpts from my private mail to switch to a mail agent that won't
> do that so easily.  So I don't think that's really a realistic
> option, dearly appreciated though it is.

A realistic approach for you should be to switch to a mail agent that
doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

-- Mark --

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Dec 1995 09:01:28 GMT

>doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

Newsgroups headers in email are not bogus.  They are used to tell the
recipient in which newsgroup he had posted something that resulted in
an email reply to him.  This is useful information for the human
reader.  This information is not intended for automatic processing by
the mail agent.

For example, if I had chosen to send an email reply to your posting, it
would have included a header like this:

   Newsgroups: comp.mail.pine,news.admin.misc

BTW, it is good to minimize News vs email confusion and remember that
programs generally known as mail agents do not include a Newsgroups
header in email.  It is News agents that do this, when they temporarily
act as mail agents solely to allow a user to send an email reply to a
Usenet posting.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (Barry Bouwsma)
Date: 10 Dec 1995 16:09:06 GMT

>Good question.  The short answer is that it's a deficiency in IMAP2.

    To all sysadmins who have been complaining about this problem, here
is your solution.  Just start an IMAP server on your mailhost (I've wanted
to see IMAP daemons become as ubiquitous as POP servers for a long time),
and configure Pine to access inboxes and folders with IMAP.  This will
also help you migrate to a client-server IMAP mail model more quickly.

    Personally, I'll wait for IMAP4 clients, before rekindling this
debate by asking that Pine *do* posts to newsgroups when the header is
in a message accessed with IMAP2bis.  I understand the mechanics of the
variety of protocols and transfer agents that can be involved, and the
solution cannot be as clear-cut as some less-informed individuals would
like to believe.

>been interested in doing the work in Pine 3.92.

-- 
 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: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Dec 1995 17:45:13 -0800

> doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

Mark, that's simply not productive.  rn was around *LONG* before Pine ever
showed up, and putting the Newgroups: line in responses to postings is the
accepted behavior.  Almost every Unix newsreader I've used does that.

Any Internet-related software needs to allow for and work with the existing
software.  There's simply *far* too large of an existing software base to
expect it all to change because you want to do something different (even if
what you want is better, which I disagree with).  Saying "then fix the
existing software" is not an acceptable answer.

If the Pine development team has decided that they are simply going to
refuse to change this, fine.  It's their software; they can do whatever they
please.  Just say so, so that the rest of us can start actively encouraging
people to use a different mail reader that can better handle the realities
of Internet communications.

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

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 8 Dec 1995 20:26:12 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
> problem which does not exist and can not exist in any released version of

That's like saying "you don't drink and drive, and based entirely on
heresay you complained about a problem that doesn't exist in our cars
and can not exist in any released version of our cars".

The problem I'm complaining about is:

	1. Pine loses the distinction between news and mail.
	2. People are getting hurt as a result.

You stated flat out that there is no way to distinguish news and mail. Many
people, myself among them, disagreed. You made some changes in the user
interface, but people kept on getting hurt. You did not clearly indicate
that further changes were being contemplated, choosing instead to harp on
this philosophy you have that news and mail should be indistinguishable.

I'm really glad to see you found a solution, but all these red herrings
are beside the point. I don't need to drink and drive to get hit by a
drunk driver. I don't need to use Pine to be aware that there's a problem
with it.

> You even harassed me about this on alt.sys.pdp-10, of all inappropriate

I don't think I brought the subject up in a.s.p10, but it's possible. But
once it came up I consistently reset followups *out* of the group because
it *was* inappropriate. Why people insisted on setting them back is not
something I care to speculate and in any case is beyond my control.

> Perhaps the next time that you think that you are not being answered, you

Perhaps the next time that your answer doesn't seem to be accepted, you could
try listening to the question again.
-- 
Peter da Silva    (NIC: PJD2)      `-_-'             1601 Industrial Boulevard
Bailey Network Management           'U`             Sugar Land, TX  77487-5013
+1 713 274 5180         "Har du kramat din varg idag?"                     USA
Bailey pays for my technical expertise.        My opinions probably scare them

---

From: [email-masked] (Seth Breidbart)
Date: 11 Dec 1995 16:45:21 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>,
>doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

There's a command to change that header to
X-Newsgroups-because-Pine-is-braindead: which won't cause
unintentional posting when you mail to naive users.

Seth

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 18:10:51 GMT

>doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

Indeed, I have.  But (surprised?) this doesn't quite solve the
problem for me: as a newsgroup moderator, I sometimes receive
"posts" sent to my mailbox made by unsuspecting users.  Since I
cannot tell that there is anything out of the ordinary about these
posts, I go ahead and approve them, which then creates no small
amount of displeasure on the part of the wronged parties.

Any ideas, O Insightful One?

---

From: [email-masked] (kruise)
Date: 7 Dec 1995 01:49:01 GMT

Peter da Silva ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In article <[email-masked]>,
: > Pine is a good product.  Learn how to use it effectively before 
: > ventilating your pique in public.

: Pine is intended to be used by naive users. It should be designed to not
: surprise them.
: -- 

Wait one second!  Were on the Pine development team?

Peter how much did you pay for your copy of Pine???  I'm getting sick of 
all the bitching about Pine going on in this group.  If you don't like it 
switch to something else!  

Personally, there are a few things I'd like to see changed in Pine
however, I think it's the best Unix email interface available!  And it's
free!!  The people at UW have done a great job!  You are appreciated!

Randy Kreuziger
Wash Dept of Fish and Wildlife
Olympia, WA

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 9 Dec 1995 01:28:27 GMT

In <loo-oong-message-id> [email-masked] (James Black) writes:

>My second rule of programming 

In all fairness, let's note that hardware is actually pretty smart;
it's the software that's often stupid.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 10:09:49 -0800

Correction: this has already been done in Pine 3.92, along with
Followup-to support.  Teaches me not to pay attention during meetings.

It is still the case that an email transport can change things so that the
Newsgroups header appears to be false, so you have to watch out for that.

-- Mark --

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 Dec 1995 02:10:40 -0800

> free!!  The people at UW have done a great job!  You are appreciated!

Yes, they did, and I do appreciate it.  I also appreciate gcc.  That doesn't
mean that if it produced incorrect code, I wouldn't complain about it.  Just
because I like the package doesn't mean that I'm not going to submit bug
reports or complain about problems.

The fact that Pine cannot distinguish between news and mail is bad.  I
explicitly make a point of telling people not to use Pine as a news reader
because of it.  I would be very happy if it could be fixed.  And the fact
that I'm unhappy about that part of Pine in no way makes me ungrateful for
the rest of the package.

I would encourage the Pine developers to take a look at Gnus 5 and see how
it handles being both a news and mail reader at the same time.  It does a
much better job.

---

From: "Marsha C. Holmes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 1995 08:27:26 -0400

Well said!!

Marsha

=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*
  Marsha C. Holmes        |\ __ /.|   (`\
[email-masked]    _ .| o o   |_   ) )
----------------------(((---(((-------------
Homepage:  http://www.ccn.cs.dal.ca/~ac573/Profile.html
=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Dec 1995 12:57:21 GMT

Russ Allbery <[email-masked]> wrote:
>In news.admin.misc, Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> I believe that mail-and-post is the only thing that can stop usenet from
>> turning into IRC. It increases coherency; it's necessary.  Learn to live
>> with it.
>
>*ONLY* if you state explicitly in your message that it was both mailed and
>posted.  Most people do, but some do not, and the ones who do not are highly
>annoying.  I don't want to have to respond to the same message twice.

I shouldn't have to do that; your reader should indicate that for you
from the headers.

All mailers should indicate that a received email was also posted to
a newsgroup, and if so give the option of replying privately or to the 
newsgroup - 'public' or 'private' mail.

> I, for one, will killfile in both mail *and* news those who post and mail
> without clearly stating so.

You must have one hell of a large killfile.

L.

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 13 Dec 1995 19:43:04 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
>I shouldn't have to do that; your reader should indicate that for you

Let's see: I have an RFC 822 compliant mail reader. How is it supposed
to know from RFC 822 headers that what you have just mailed me something
that you also posted to news? 

>newsgroup - 'public' or 'private' mail.

This information is not available to "all mailers" (I assume you mean
mail user agents, since sendmail and smail are not, and should not be,
concerned with who posted what). It is not available to ANY mail agent,
since there is NO defined header which indicates this information.

>You must have one hell of a large killfile.

And you have a mailer which does not comply with RFC 821.

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 17 Dec 95 00:24:28 GMT

>annoying.  I don't want to have to respond to the same message twice.

Amen.  I hate getting email response to a post, reply to it, then check the
newsgroup and find the same reply/followup there.  There are (r)eplies and
(f)ollowups in Usenet culture.  The problem with pine is that it promotes
confounding the two.

 >without clearly stating so.

Drastic, but perhaps reasonable.

Pine for mail, nn for news, jove or emacs for editing.

-- 
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)810-762-9765   ___________________
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst.    /   _____  ______ 
  Flint, MI 48504      [email-masked]               /        / /  /  / /
  Web admin:  chimera,nn,tin,jove,kermit - free's best!/________/ /  /  / /

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 17 Dec 95 02:31:17 GMT

Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]> writes:

 >In <[email-masked]> Lloyd Wood
 ><[email-masked]> writes:
 >...
 >>>>Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]> wrote:
 >>>>>via email a Usenet posting is desirable behavior. 
 >...

 >>No.

 >>Scan some newsgroups, and make a note of the number of people who
 >>request information by email....
 >>If mail-and-post isn't desirable behaviour, why are so many people
 >>adopting it? 

 >People make the following requests on Usenet (Q), and here is my
 >raction (A).

 >Q: Please email me your reply, as I don't read this newsgroup.
 >A: What an arrogant jerk!

My A: I mail them, telling them I have posted the answer to the newsgroup,
AND that I think it is arrogant of them to burst into a room, shout "I don't
have time to get to know any of you, but I INSIST that you immediately
answer my question, but I am not going to stay around long enough to hear
the answer, so please send it to my house!"

I think Rahul's A: is too subtle for those asses.

 >Q: Please send replies by email, and I will post a summary.
 >A: Smart person!  I will be glad to cooperate.

 >Q: Please email me a copy of any postings, my News access isn't reliable.
 >A: Be glad to oblige.

 >Only in the third case would I also send by email a copy of a
 >posting, and only because the recipient requested it, and only after
 >making sure I added a comment to prevent confusion, e.g.:

We certainly don't want to prevent confusion do we? ;}

 >     Hi, in response to your request, here's an email copy of something
 >     I just posted to Usnet.

...

---

From: [email-masked] (Ellen Keyne Seebacher)
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 18:11:55 GMT

Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:

>	3) moderators should pay more attention to what they approve (as
>	   a list moderator, I fully understand the difficulty!).

Your mailing list has four co-moderators, gets over a hundred messages
a day, and has a high proportion of newbie posters who don't understand
what Pine is telling them when they post private replies?

I'm sure the soc.genealogy.surnames moderators are grateful that you
assign blame squarely where blame is due.

--
Ellen Keyne Seebacher              [email-masked]

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 17:58:33 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:

>This problem goes away with Pine 3.92 due to the anti-falsing code.
>...
>The problem is prevented if any of the three conditions above are absent.
>When Pine 3.92 comes out, there's a fourth: "User A is running an old
>version which lacks anti-falsing" ...

"So fix tin, nn and the trn family!" -- Mark Crispin.

So very interesting.  Some months ago, in an earlier incarnation
of this discussion, that was the "solution" you offered to the
problem of posting private mail: fix every other news software
platform on the planet.  Of course, even if the software
maintainers had agreed immediately to make the required changes,
it would not have affected legacy platforms, where software
packages ten years old and older still run.  But at the time, you
indicated no recognition that there was any such problem with
legacy software -- or, if you did, you apparently did not care
about it.

However, now that you have finally agreed to modify Pine's
behavior to (hopefully) eliminate this problem, suddenly you
demonstrate some comprehension that legacy systems will pose a
problem.  Whoops!  We've still got to worry about those Pine 3.91
users!  So, since the release of 3.92 will apparently not fix the
problem *completely*, would it be fair to say that your demand to
"fix tin, nn and the trn family" was similarly misdirected?

The irony of this, of course, is that we need to worry about
legacy software mainly because 3.91 has been out for over a year,
and has become wildly popular in that time.  Suppose that,
immediately after last year's release, you had admitted that the
Pine philosophy of news presents a practical problem that could be
fixed immediately without impairing Pine's ability to read or post
news, and if you had promptly prepared a bug-fix release.  Had
that happened, we would have much less reason to worry now about
coping with sites at which Pine 3.91 is now installed and may
never be upgraded.  But because you have dragged your collective
heels for sixteen months, we cannot avoid it.

This brings me back to my original, principal complaint about the
state of Pine development.  The real problem is not simply that a
bug was written, or that the Pine designers have a vision for
their software which diverges from that of its users.  The real
problem is that they seem unable to recognize a serious design
flaw when it presents itself, or that they are unwilling to treat
that flaw responsibly and in a prompt manner.  What will happen
when a problem like this happens again?

I'd hate to think what might happen if any of you guys were
doctors and had to deal with a burst appendix.  Why should it be
*your* responsibility to fix it, since the thing shouldn't even
have been there in the first place?

>Instead of settling for a single magic bullet, it is more sensible to
>attack the problem on all fronts:
>	1) discourage the use of the "Newsgroups:" header in messages
>	   that are not posted.  This behavior is not sanctioned by any
>	   specification, and may be outlawed in the future (more
>	   likely, "Newsgroups:" will be deprecated in favor of a new
>	   and unambiguous mechanism, but that will also force everyone
>	   to change).

This behavior is neither sanctioned nor discouraged by any
specification, and for many years it has been common practice,
with a meaning orthogonal to that which Pine has imposed.

>	2) encourage users to pay careful attention to where they send
>	   their messages in all cases.  There are innumerable cases of
>	   inadvertant posting to news with *all* news posting software,
>	   and inadvertant posting to mailing lists with *all* mail
>	   software.  This is a much wider problem that Pine.

Pine does not allow the user to make a clear distinction between
the two entities (perhaps because Pine does not make a clear
distinction itself).  Even users who are paying careful attention
to the disposition of their messages are regularly misled by
Pine's diagnostic messages.

>	   a list moderator, I fully understand the difficulty!).

Newsgroups which have multiple moderators, at different injection
points, do not have this luxury.  I do not.

>	4) software should anti-false the "Newsgroups:" header.

Only, it seems, because Pine has taken the initiative of forcibly
redefining it for the rest of the world.  I agree that this is a
smart practical decision, but your insistence upon making it
everyone else's *responsibility* is deplorable.

>	5) software should require explicit user decision for posting
>	   or mailing, instead of trusting the user to pay proper
>	   attention to a yes/no question.

Software should not even ask the user whether they wish to post
something to news that was not news to begin with.  The user is
merely answering a message that was sent to them; if the software
chooses to treat news and mail identically, the software should be
responsible for dispatching the message appropriately, and should
not pass the buck to the user.

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 17 Dec 1995 21:26:50 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Lloyd Wood  <[email-masked]> wrote:
> [email-masked] (John Stanley) wrote:
> > Please
> >explain why an RFC-822 compliant mail agent is going to know about
> >headers that are not defined for mail.

> Pine does.

Then it's not RFC-822 compliant. It's "RFC-822 + RFC-1036 + house conference
committee to resolve the conflicts in these documents"-subset compliant.
-- 
Peter da Silva    (NIC: PJD2)      `-_-'             1601 Industrial Boulevard
Bailey Network Management           'U`             Sugar Land, TX  77487-5013
+1 713 274 5180         "Har du kramat din varg idag?"                     USA
Bailey pays for my technical expertise.        My opinions probably scare them

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 13 Dec 1995 19:36:25 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Lloyd Wood  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>Is it? 

Yes.

>What are current usenet propagation times around the planet? What
>spool expiry settings are people using?

Irrelevant. 

>Mail-and-post is a good way of keeping those interested in a thread
>aware of responses to them,

No, letting people see the articles in news is a good way of informing
people of your replies.

> even if they're unable to check in with
>their spool before the thread expires. 

If they can't read news for that long, what makes you think they are
reading their mail, either? And if the reason they stop reading news is
because they lost interest, why do you think it is proper to dump copies
of your articles into their mail?

>We're currently on five days
>or less here for all groups, and lots of articles in many, even
>serious, groups are alone, with all their references
>expired from the spools.

So what? References are supposed to expire. If you don't want the
references to dissappear, save a copy. You not saving a copy of what you
want to keep is not a reason to dump copies of news into other people's
mailboxes.

>I believe that mail-and-post is the only thing that can stop usenet
>from turning into IRC. It increases coherency; it's necessary.

Baloney. It removes coherency by causing people to respond twice to the
same message: once when it shows up in mail and then again when it shows
up in news. 

>Learn to live with it.

Baloney.

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Dec 1995 15:13:48 -0800

[ Posted and e-mailed. ]

>> *ONLY* if you state explicitly in your message that it was both mailed
>> and posted.  Most people do, but some do not, and the ones who do not are
>> highly annoying.  I don't want to have to respond to the same message
>> twice.

> I shouldn't have to do that; your reader should indicate that for you

What header?  Not the Newsgroups: line, since many, if not most, news
readers will insert that in an e-mailed reply to a news article (and have
for some time).

Here, let me give you an excerpt from the Gnus 5 info pages:

`gnus-auto-mail-to-author'
     If `ask', you will be prompted for whether you want to send a mail
     copy to the author of the article you are following up.  If
     non-`nil' and not `ask', Gnus will send a mail with a copy of all
     follow-ups to the authors of the articles you follow up.  It's nice
     in one way - you make sure that the person you are responding to
     gets your response.  Other people loathe this method and will hate
     you dearly for it, because it means that they will first get a
     mail, and then have to read the same article later when they read
     the news.  It is `nil' by default.

`gnus-mail-courtesy-message'
     This is a string that will be prepended to all mails that are the
     result of using the variable described above.

If Pine and whatever other mailers or news readers that you use to send mail
replies to newsgroup postings would implement something equivalent to
gnus-mail-courtesy-message, I'd be perfectly happy.  And I will honor all
requests to send a mail copy -- for example, I'm sending an e-mail copy of
this message, since you apparently prefer that.

But there is no header which can communicate this information, and the rest
of the world isn't going to change to fit your concept of how reality should
be.

> You must have one hell of a large killfile.

No, only one person so far has been persistantly rude enough to keep sending
me unmarked e-mail copies of followups after I've asked that they stop.  I
see you're trying to be the second, though.

---

From: [email-masked] (Wolfgang Schelongowski)
Date: 19 Dec 1995 18:38:49 +0100

In <[email-masked]> Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]> writes:

>Any integrated mail agent/newsreader ought to.

Shouldn't exist. Confuses it's users.

>Usenet and email are converging.

<fx: tries to make sense of preceding sentence, shakes his hoar head>

"Should NEVER have done."
-- 
Wolfgang Schelongowski  [email-masked]

The public would say, "Who, _me_? Make a mistake? Me, the _voter_?"
  -- P.J. O'Rourke, Protectors of a Blameless Citizenry

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan Grobe)
Date: 14 Dec 1995 04:43:44 GMT

When is Pine 3.92 coming out?
--
Jonathan Grobe <[email-masked]>

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 15 Dec 1995 18:51:59 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Lloyd Wood  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>request information by email. 

So? There will always be rude people who think newsgroups were created
as their personal answer source, who can't imagine that anyone else
might be interested in knowing the answer to the question they asked, or
that might have a better answer or a correction to an answer that is
wrong.

That doesn't make dumping duplicate copies of articles into people's
mailboxes because you are too lazy to notice that they weren't asked for
correct behaviour.

I suppose you can show me where I asked YOU to send ME copies of
everything you post? No? Then why are you doing it?

>Consider that Pine integrates mail and news; that Netscape does to.

No, they have made an attempt at doing it, and they don't have the
information they need to do it right.

>If mail-and-post isn't desirable behaviour, why are so many people

Because they are sheep? Because they think that, since their spiffy
newsreader allows them to do it, it must be a spiffy thing to do? Or 
maybe they are just obnoxious twits who think they have the right to
harass people by email.

>Very relevant - usenet has increased in volume rapidly, and it's
>impossible to store threads long enough to make sense of them.

So sending people a copy of one small piece of a thread is a solution?
No, that's just plain stupid.

>If I see an article in news and respond to it, great.

Yep, great.

>If someone responds to me in news, I may miss it in our spool. I have

That is your problem. Get a bigger spool. Get an agent that scans for
news that you are interested in. 

I really don't care if you miss articles you are interested in, and
SENDING ME A COPY OF YOUR ARTICLES isn't going to solve your problem.

>If they respond by mail-and-post, I am much more likely to reply
>and continue the thread.

You can't "continue the thread" by replying to mail. There isn't
sufficient information in a mail header to allow that. 

>Usenet's makeup has changed. There are more 'occasional' users; there's
>more volume; there's less in the way of quoted material allowing you
>to make sense of a thread in many groups. Mail-and-post can combat this.

Mail-and-post don't combat anything. Mail-and-post is an abuse,
especially when you have been told to stop.

>>reading their mail, either?
>
>Not 'can't' - won't. 

Ok, if they won't bother reading news, then so what if they miss it?
That's part of life. Tough nooggies. That is their choice.

>Home users may only access at weekends. 

So access more often. Christ almighty, people who CHOOSE not to read
news shouldn't be the impetus behind how news is run.

>With short spool settings, the
>responses to their posted articles have already expired. 

Yes. So? If they cared about replies, they would read more often.

>With mail-and-post, they're still in the loop.

In a loop that they may not want to be in. And, in your example, a loop
they have chosen not to be in. So, what you are saying is, "God damn it,
you WILL see my reply even if you don't want to, because I think my
reply is SO damned important I will send it to you personally, even when
you tell me not to."

>>And if the reason they stop reading news is
>Posting an article indicates that you have an interest in the responses
>to it. 

So you read news to see the responses.

>Sending a copy by mail is courtesy - 

Right.

>they're not going to have
>to look for your reply - and it compensates for shorter and shorter
>spool times as the usenet volume increases.

You sending me a copy of your crap does nothing to solve your spool
problems. Why do you think it does? Are you going to ask me to return
copies of something you posted to you when they expire? Why not just
keep your own copies of what you post, instead of demanding that I keep
them for you?

>In any case, it's easier for naive users to delete an email than to search
>a newsgroup for articles of interest to them.

So what? It is easier for a naive user to just not log in. Is that the
proper solution?

>And as the references have expired, the single articles left make
>no sense at all. 

But the single articles showing up in my mailbox from you are supposed
to make sense. Right.

>Usenet is in a sorry state indeed if or experience
>is typical of news spools.

It is in a sorry state when people post sentences like that. 

>I bow to your obviously intelligent and reasoned arguments.

When you present something that shows what mail-and-post is proper
behaviour, you have some right to make that statement. When you
understand how news and mail works a little better, you can make that
statement. When you think about the problems of combined news and mail a
little more, you can make that statement. Until then, you are, as you
yourself put it, "ho hum".

Now, stop sending me copies of your articles by mail. Get a mailer that
understands fatal response codes from the receiver.

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 15 Dec 1995 18:28:51 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Lloyd Wood  <[email-masked]> wrote:
>How about the existence of a PATH header? 

Please read RFC 822 and show me where it defines the Path header. Please
explain why an RFC-822 compliant mail agent is going to know about
headers that are not defined for mail.

Now please explain why, out of all of the pieces of crap people have
thought it necessary to dump into my mailbox while they were posting,
not a single one of them has had a Path header. 

No, "existence of Path" is not the answer, and if you thought about it
for even half a second, you would know that.

>A user mail agent that isn't a newsreader (sorry, 'user
>news agent') can at least indicate to the header-impaired (i.e. 99.9%
>of the people who have news and mail access) whether
>a received mail is private (email) or public (mail-and-post).

"User mail agents" don't know whether what they are seeing has been
mailed or not. They can't possibly know, because there is no header
which tells them that.

Do you get particular delight out of abusing the technical terms like
you do?

>>It is not available to ANY mail agent,
>In which case, define one. Call it 'Posted-To:'. Ho-hum, this is easy.

Yes. It is so easy. What, exactly, does "Posted-To:" mean? When is it
used? How is it used by a mail agent when creating a reply? What other
headers need to be changed or created to allow "Posted-To:" to work?
How does the agent keep track of whether a filed copy of something is mail
or news or both? Have you bothered to think about any of this?  No,
apparently not.

I have.  That is why I have a proposed RFC already written.
But it isn't an RFC yet, and you are speaking in the present tense.
That means you think there is an answer NOW. Tell us all what the answer
NOW is. Not what you think should be created. 

Until you can exhibit your present-day solution to support your
present-day claims, ho-hum yourself.

By the way, get a mailer that understands permanent failure result codes
in SMTP.

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 1995 16:03:49 -0800

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.

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

-- Mark --

---

From: [email-masked] (Steve Howie)
Date: 14 Dec 1995 21:57:01 GMT

Tim Pierce ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In article <[email-masked]>,
: Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:
: 
: >This problem goes away with Pine 3.92 due to the anti-falsing code.
: >...
: >The problem is prevented if any of the three conditions above are absent.
: >When Pine 3.92 comes out, there's a fourth: "User A is running an old
: >version which lacks anti-falsing" ...
: 
: "So fix tin, nn and the trn family!" -- Mark Crispin.
: 

I have tried to reproduce the problem using Pine 3.91. I can't. 

1. I Post using Tin.
2. A colleague replies to the posting and the reply gets sent to me.
3. I reply to this email message using Pine 3.91.
4. The email reply goes to the person in 2.
5. Nothing gets posted to the newsgroup.

Am I missing something in this discussion?  Or are you all talking about 
a different scenario?

Scotty
=================================================================
Steve Howie                             Email:  [email-masked]
NetNews and Gopher Admin.               Phone:  (519) 824-4120 x2556
Computing and Communications Svcs.      Fax:    (519) 763-6143
University of Guelph

If it's not Scottish its CRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPP
=================================================================

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Dec 1995 05:40:44 GMT

In <loo-oong-message-id> Mark Crispin <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I [intend to alter source for pine]
>> so that Newsgroups: lines in the header of a mail
>> message are completely ignored...

>If you do that, then users won't be able to post followups when they are

*Ack*

News vs email confusion.

The poster wants pine to ignore the Newsgroups header in email.

Not in News.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Dec 1995 14:28:36 -0800

>> explicitly make a point of telling people not to use Pine as a news
>> reader because of it.

> This is exactly the opposite advice you should be giving people.

Yes, you're right...I said that backwards from what I was thinking.  Sorry
about that.

> 1] Use Pine as a news reader 

I'm sorry to post this to the Pine newsgroup, but news and news readers are
a specialty of mine.  I support them, maintain them, document them, and use
them extensively.  I've tried a huge variety of news readers, from the
standard rn/trn/strn to tin, nn, Netscape, News Watcher, NewsGrazer, and a
half-dozen other news readers including Pine.

Pine is quite literally one of the worst news readers I have ever seen.

This is only partially because of the fact that it doesn't understand the
difference between mail and news.  In terms of screen organization, user
interface, efficiency, and features, Pine is one of the last in every
respect.  There is no way I would ever recommend the program as a news
reader.  The only time when I can possibly think of someone wanting to use
it as a news reader is if they want an integrated interface to mail and news
and are already familiar with Pine.

>    If you use Pine as a news reader, you will not have to worry about 
>    someone (who uses Pine as her mail client) inadvertantly posting a 
>    msg that you privately mailed as a response to a news group msg.  
>    This is because Pine strips the Newsgroups header in msgs that are 
>    mailed but not posted.  

And this behavior is *incorrect*.  It means that the recipient of the e-mail
reply may not know what newsgroups the message originated from; that's a
problem that I have personally had, since I'm active in quite a number of
newsgroups on different subjects, and replies with subjects like "Help" that
don't quote anything (common from AOL users, for one) often make it very
hard to figure out what the person was referring to.  Having the Newsgroups:
header helps considerably.

The Newsgroups: header does not mean what Pine thinks it means.  This is a
design flaw.

> If everyone in the world used Pine for both news and mail, then this
> feature would not be a bug.

Yes.  And as you state yourself, that's never going to happen.

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Dec 1995 06:09:49 GMT

...

If you are claiming that it's a good thing to send by email an
identical copy of every posting you make, the fact that some people
make certain rquests as listed above does not seem to support your
claim.

People often adopt many behaviors because they like doing certain
things to others which they do not necessarily want to have done to
themselves.  I confess I am tempted to harrass you to death by sending
you in email an exact copy of every posting I ever make to Usenet, but
that doesn't mean that I want you to do this to me (or even that I
would actually do it to you).
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
"please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 19:20:53 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,

>If you do that, then users won't be able to post followups when they are

What a CALAMITY!

---

From: Nico van der Horn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 17:01:05 +0100 (CEST)

> People make the following requests on Usenet (Q), and here is my

Correction: "reaction"; some people develop bad spelling behaviour.

> A: What an arrogant jerk!

What an unfrendly reaction if the other party has no Usenet access !

> "please ignore Dhesi" -- Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>

Last line is probably the best ;-) ... No hard feelings !

---
[email-masked] (N.J. van der Horn), VANDERHORN VOF, Oranjelaan 40,
3135 ZP Vlaardingen, The Netherlands, Tel +31104600411, Fax +31104342857

---

From: Tony Iannotti <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 12:14:28 -0500 (EST)

> What an unfrendly reaction if the other party has no Usenet access !

How would they have posted the request if they had no access? I suppose they
could have asked a friend to post, but then the address would have to be
entered by hand, and in that case I guess it's reasonable. Still, usually
questions that are appropriate to a newsgroup would have answers from which
other people reading the newsgroup would benefit.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 15 Dec 1995 05:06:19 GMT

<[email-masked]>:
Distribution: 

Steve Howie ([email-masked]) wrote:
       ... in part, lottsa stuff deleted ...

: I have tried to reproduce the problem using Pine 3.91. I can't. 
: 1. I Post using Tin.
: 2. A colleague replies to the posting and the reply gets sent to me.
: 3. I reply to this email message using Pine 3.91.
: 4. The email reply goes to the person in 2.
: 5. Nothing gets posted to the newsgroup.
: Am I missing something in this discussion?  Or are you all talking about 
: a different scenario?
: Scotty

Nope Scotty, yer not missing anything, these are just a bunch of people 
too stupid to figure out that when asked if they want to also post their 
pine mail reply to a newsgroup, they should answer (n)o instead of (y)es.

                          /\    /~\/\/\    /\      /\  /\   |>>

---

From: Nico van der Horn <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 1995 00:45:35 +0100 (CEST)

On Fri, 22 Dec 1995, Tony Iannotti wrote:

> > > Raoul Desi wrote:
> How would they have posted the request if they had no access?

You can follow most newsgroups by mail if there is a crosslink established
by the moderator as is the case with the Pine-list. Ofcourse you must
subscribe by some procedure, but that's only once. We have an UUCP-account
for mail and no extra provisions for news. For a small company like ours
this is quite usefull. 

> Still, usually questions that are appropriate to a newsgroup would have
> answers from which other people reading the newsgroup would benefit.

Agreed ! One's problems are seldom unique, so we can 'share' knowledge.

I use Pine now for some time on our own system, that poll's our Internet 
provider several times a day. In addition I have a login account on their 
machine, that I mainly use for WWW-surfing. In addition there is Pine 
available on that machine, and there I can use Pine to read news 
directly. There are other solutions as well (eg. Trumpet Newsreader), but 
this is what I do sometimes.

Therefore I feel it is handy to ask for reply by mail if I do not follow a 
group very frequently. My opinion is that the effort to send a copy by mail 
would not be that much asked !

For good order: my comment was intended to explain, not to be crude.

---

---

From: [email-masked] (Michael Handler)
Date: 14 Dec 1995 00:43:27 GMT

> doesn't put bogus "Newsgroups" headers into your mail.

Or maybe you should stop telling your program to misinterpret a header
that is undefined in email?

-- 
Michael Handler <[email-masked]>                          Philadelphia, PA
            Speech is silver, silence is golden. Self is universe.

      erna handler (1916-1995) -- "And it's the last moment I remember,
       which I see them all, thru myself, now -- tho not you / I didn't
    forsee what you felt -- what more hideous gape of bad mouth came first
         -- to you -- and were you prepared?" -- Ginsberg, "Kaddish"

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Dec 1995 09:57:39 GMT

Pine does.

>I have.  That is why I have a proposed RFC already written.

Where?

>By the way, get a mailer that understands permanent failure result codes

Sorry, that's not high on my list of Things I look for in Mailers.

L.

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 Dec 1995 21:10:09 GMT

Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]> wrote:
>you in email an exact copy of every posting I ever make to Usenet

You're welcome to send me in email an exact copy of every posting
you make replying to any posting I ever make on Usenet.

L.

note, that's EXACT copy. Headers and all.

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 17 Dec 1995 19:10:26 GMT

>>headers that are not defined for mail.

Learn to read. I said "mail agent", not "news agent", and I asked "why",
not "which ones".

>Any integrated mail agent/newsreader ought to.

Well, learn to read. I didn't say "combined agent", I said "mail agent".
Any agent that handles news should know about news headers, but that
isn't the question I asked, now is it?

>Usenet and email are converging.

Not here. Tell me why my mail agent has to know about news headers.

>>I have.  That is why I have a proposed RFC already written.

Well, I wrote it here, but it was posted in the newsgroup where it was
appropriate.

>>NOW is. Not what you think should be created. 

And your present-day solution was? You apparently forgot to answer this
part, despite leaving it in.

>Sorry, that's not high on my list of Things I look for in Mailers.

Yes, I can understand that RFC compliance is not important to you.

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1995 22:12:54 -0800

In news.admin.misc, Alan Brown <[email-masked]> writes:

> Integrated news/mail readers have existed for years in the UUCP world and 
> don't show any signs of confusing their users.

Agreed.  I use an integrated mail/news reader.  The problem isn't with the
theory.  The problem is with Pine.  It doesn't clearly and unequivocally
separate mail from news.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jeff Mercer)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 09:33:58 GMT

Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>wrote:
>On 22 Dec 1995, Tony Iannotti wrote:
>True.  But why should the person who asked the question be expected to
>read thousands of messages in the newsgroup to find the single answer, or
>otherwise be forced to filter out all the unwanted messages?  I think that
>it's awfully parochial to insist that someone must subscribe to a
>newsgroup in order to ask any questions.

The difference is between saying "Hey, I have a question but I can't be
bothered to actually read this group, just email the answer", which *is*
rather rude and presumtious and somewhat arrogant, and something such as "I
have a question but I don't reguarlly read this group. If someone could
be so kind as to reply in Email I'd really appreacite it! Thank!".

And as pointed out, it's also nice to post a summary. SHaring and all that.
For example, I asked about a particular .MOD on alt.binaries.sounds.mod and
received a variety of responses, all polite. Mostly because my request was
phrased politely, *and* because I said I'd post the .MOD once I found it!
(Haven't yet, darn it.)

P.S.
  It's possible to post to a Usenet newsgroup even if you don't have news
access, thanks to Email gateways. But it's important to indicate this in a
request and still offer to post results...

P.P.S.
  It's also important to check FAQ's and such first.

 [email-masked]   : NetDOOM: Reach out and Crush someone!                       
 Jeff The Riffer  :                                                             
    Drifter...    :                                                             
Homo Postmortemus :

---

From: [email-masked] (Alan Brown)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 18:23:59 +1300

In article <[email-masked]>,

-- 
"But you can't say they have arrived to classify your nervous lies
 What's right, what's not, what may not be. Don't try your tricky tests on me
 For I won't live in fear my friend - that every day could be my end"

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 23 Dec 95 14:34:54 GMT

>newsgroup in order to ask any questions.

I will go back to the analogy of a crowded room.  The person who is
unfamiliar with the group should either hang around and figure out what the
social rules of the crowd are and what has brought the group together.  It
is extremely boorish to barge into the room, saying "I do not have time to
waste getting to know/know about you people, but I insist that someone stop
what they are doing and tell me how to solve my problem.  I am not going to
hang around long enough to let you explain it to me, so I want you to write
up the solution and find an envelope and go out to the post office and mail
it to my home.  I wrote the address on a slip of paper and you will have to
pick it up off the floor somewhere over there."  These jerks are usually
asking a FAQ that has been discussed at least twice that week anyway.  If
they would hang around for about three days they would usually find the
answer.

I think such people should be excoriated by all and sundry.

 >Sometimes, it is the case that a person needs to ask a question about a
 >particular topic that normally she is not interested in.  The obvious
 >thing to do is to check at the newsgroup devoted to that topic.  It is
 >unreasonable to expect her to search through thousands of messages for an
 >answer.

With a proper news reader the task of screening 1000's of messages is not
all that time consuming.  I use nn, which allows me to rapidly search all
the headers in a newsgroup and tag those messages that I am interested in
for reading.  nn has no peer that I know of in this regard.  All the others
I have tried require me to constantly go back and forth between the Subject
headers menu and reading articles, which is wasted motion.

Many newbies use readers that have easy-to-use features that severely limit
a knowledgeable user's ability to get things done.

 >If the newsgroup has an easy-to-find FAQ, it may be a good idea to check
 >there, but all too often the FAQ is not in evidence.  Unless the site
 >supports a threaded database, even the act of scanning the subjects of the
 >newsgroup for "FAQ" can be time-consuming.

There needs to be a standard for news readers that makes it difficult for
someone to post without being assaulted with the FAQ.

 >This is an excellent example where it would be reasonable for the reply to
 >be directed both by news and by email.

I post the answer and mail to the user if they want the answer they are
going to have to go back and read the group.

 >Typical example:
 >	% post comp.sys.blurdybloop
 >	Subject: can Blurdybloop computers support Garply protocol?
 >	Hello.  Our site is migrating to Garply protocol.  Most of our
 >	machines are Gazork systems, but we have one Blurdybloop system
 >	installed years ago that handles our payroll.  Is it possible
 >	to get Garply protocol support on Blurdybloop computers?
 >	Please reply by email, since I don't normally read this newsgroup.

 >You may claim that it's her fault for not reading comp.sys.blurdybloop for
 >the past several years, thus knowing about the very active discussion of
 >Garply support that took place six months ago.  But most human beings find

What about 2 or 3 days ago, which means it is still in the news spool on her
server, if she would bother to search through the messages.

 >themselves obliged to concentrate their attention on what they do every
 >day; in this case, she's reading comp.sys.gazork.

 >Why not just answer "Check the FAQ file, ftp://blurdybloop.com/FAQ"?
 >That's what happens in most civilized newsgroups.

The FAQ's need to be easier to access from the newsreader, both for the
newbie and for the poster who wants to double-check the FAQ before saying
"It is in the FAQ."

---

From: [email-masked] (Leslie Mikesell)
Date: 23 Dec 1995 18:16:40 -0600

In article <[email-masked]>,

>that might have a better answer or a correction to an answer that is

If you aren't motivated to provide an answer to such questions, then
don't.  That's simple enough.  But if you are going to go to the
trouble to make a reply is it too much extra work for you to send
a copy the way they asked?  Most newsreaders provide exactly the
mechanism you need, and for good reason.  And if you feel that
others on the newsgroup would like to see your response it is equally
easy to send a copy there at the same time, for equally good reasons.

>mailboxes because you are too lazy to notice that they weren't asked for

That remains a matter of opinion.

>everything you post? No? Then why are you doing it?

Many people like receiving email copies, and it is normal for
reasonable people to think that other reasonable people will
share their preferences.  Often this is untrue, but it is normal...

>maybe they are just obnoxious twits who think they have the right to

Or they think that if you send out something with your return
address on it you are interested in receiving replies.   If
you aren't, hmmm...

>sufficient information in a mail header to allow that. 

Indeed, this is a problem, and the one that should be fixed. This
could also fix the problem of not being able to tell if the message
was also posted.

>reply is SO damned important I will send it to you personally, even when

If you don't want a reply, why not stop posting?  Or keep your email
address off of it?

Les Mikesell
  [email-masked]

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Dec 1995 21:55:20 GMT

...

>But why should the person who asked the question be expected to
>otherwise be forced to filter out all the unwanted messages? 

**** Wrong model. ****

When reading Usenet News, you do not read thousands of postings to
find the single answer, or filter out unwanted messages.

Your *select* the *one subject heading* that contains the answer.

There is a difference between selecting and filtering out.

You 'filter out' some things that you never want to see, e.g., postings
from specific people, or specific subjects you never want to see.  You
'select' whatever you do want to see, e.g., the specific subject heading
under which you posted the inquiry.

"Post and email" fails badly because in its usual mode of operation
the email may be sent to the wrong person.  For example:

     A posts an inquiry.
     B posts a follow-up.
     C follows up to B.
     D follows up to B.
     E follows up to A.

If each person does "post and email" in its usual mode of operation,
A will get responses only from B and E, but not from C and D.  Thus A
will need to browse Usenet himself to see all the responses.  If he
does, he will see some things (from B and E) twice and others (from C
and D) only once.  This is confusing.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 13:05:48 -0800

Typical example:

-- Mark --

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter da Silva)
Date: 25 Dec 1995 04:59:47 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
> > 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
          ^^^^

I think there's a fundamental communication problem here.

---

From: [email-masked] (Alan Brown)
Date: 26 Dec 1995 20:23:09 +1300

In article <[email-masked]>,

>newbie and for the poster who wants to double-check the FAQ before saying

A decently maintained news server sets eexpiry on *answers* in excess of 
40 days, and respects the "Expires:" header in FAQ  postings.

Of course there are innnumerable badly maintained servers which are 
pressed for space and have cut purge/*answers* retention to a few
days. :(

AB

---

From: Tony Iannotti <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 09:47:07 -0500 (EST)

> newsgroup in order to ask any questions.

I don't have any trouble wading through large newsgroups and finding answers,
because I have this great newsreader that lets me search headers for ones
that match the uestion I posted. It's called pine. 

> unreasonable to expect her to search through thousands of messages for an

Pine makes it pretty easy, why is it unreasonable? 

> newsgroup for "FAQ" can be time-consuming.

Not with pine it's not. Use the "w" key to find words in which you are
interested. 

> be directed both by news and by email.

There are situations in which I agree with you, but there are situations
where it should not be necesary. On the other hand, it's the owner of the
mailbox that is asking for it to be stuffed, so why should I mind? ;-)

---

From: [email-masked] (John Stanley)
Date: 29 Dec 1995 11:06:58 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, Leslie Mikesell <[email-masked]> wrote:
>don't.  That's simple enough.  

I don't. That's simple. That's also ignoring the problem.

>But if you are going to go to the
>a copy the way they asked?  

Yes, it is. 

>Most newsreaders provide exactly the
>mechanism you need, and for good reason.  

I do not see such a mechanism in trn, which is a very common
newsreader. You can "F" or you can "R", but there is no "FR".

>That remains a matter of opinion.

That is a matter of the RECIPIENT'S opinion. WHen the recipient tells
you it is rude, it is rude.  When the recipient tells you to stop, you
should stop. Why is this a difficult concept?

>Many people like receiving email copies, 

And many people do not. 

>and it is normal for
>share their preferences.  

It is now unreasonable to not want email copies of news articles
wasting your mailbox space. Thanks for being so objective in your
arguments.

>address on it you are interested in receiving replies.   If

The issue is not one of receiving replies, and you should be smart
enough to know that. It is one of getting those replies via a DIFFERENT
mechanism than the original article.  When I post news, I look in news
for replies. I don't ask for mail unless I think the answers are
important enough to demand IMMEDIATE attention, which is what I have to
give email. People who assume that any answer they give to any comment I
make is important enough to demand immediate attention are assuming too
much responsibility for themselves.

>Indeed, this is a problem, and the one that should be fixed. 

And this is an admission that sending mail cannot possibly be considered
"continuing the thread" -- one of the arguments for doing it.

>If you don't want a reply, why not stop posting?  

This isn't the issue, and you should be smart enough to know that.

>Or keep your email address off of it?

If you put your phone number in your article, are you saying that you
would find it permissible for people to call you and read you what they
have just posted? Are you familiar with RFC 1036 at all? You must not be
to make this sort of comment.

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 17:31:26 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Mark Crispin  <[email-masked]> wrote:

>[ Rahul Dhesi said: ]

This is like saying, "Why should someone reading a newspaper for a
single article be forced to read or ignore hundreds of
uninteresting articles simply to get to it?"

If you're reading a newsgroup for a single article -- and, in
particular, a followup to your own article -- 

>	Subject: can Blurdybloop computers support Garply protocol?

-- then you search the newsgroup for messages with "blurdybloop"
or "garply" in the subject line.  If you have a newsreader that
doesn't do this, you get rid of it.

  riddle: How do you sculpt an elephant?
  answer: get a big block of marble and carve away everything
          that doesn't look like an elephant.

I use a very nice newsreader, called "trn," which tells me at a
glance whether there have been any followups to a particular
article (e.g. my own), and will take me to those followups
instantly.  Perhaps you might consider adding such a feature to
Pine.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 30 Dec 1995 05:24:32 GMT

Peter da Silva ([email-masked]) wrote:
       ... after quoting some others ...
: >>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.
:          ^^^^
       ... Peter said ...
: I think there's a fundamental communication problem here.

Exactly Peter, there is, and the problem is that this group name is 
comp.mail.pine not comp.news.pine and my description of it says something 
like for discussions about the pine mail program or something to that 
effect.  This entire stupid thread was started by someone who mistakenly 
posted and emailed when he only meant to email, no big whoop, we all make 
mistakes, but then everyone started screaming at one another, and 
critisizing the folks at washington.edu, and the entire discussion has 
gotten totally off track.  Is PINE the best mail program ... proabably 
for what you paid for it.  Is PINE the best newsreader ... Probably not.  
OK having said that, everyone have a happy and prosperous new year, and 
please stop yelling at one another.  Only my 1895 cents worth (plus tax).

                          /\    /~\/\/\    /\      /\  /\   |>>

---

From: Tim Pierce <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 1995 14:33:34 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
Jonathan and DearOldDad <[email-masked]> wrote:

>... the problem is that this group name is 
>effect.

I see.

Am I allowed to conclude, then, that the whole of Pine's support
for Usenet reading and posting constitutes a bug?

---

From: [email-masked] (R. Stewart Ellis)
Date: 30 Dec 95 15:37:41 GMT

>for Usenet reading and posting constitutes a bug?

My attitude would be in agreement with the above statement.

I would simply like to be able to config it so that it does not do
any newsreader stuff, except allow me to look at article archives that have
been saved in mbox format.  Then it would be impossible for a naive user at
my site to innapriately post a private email reply.  I used to simply not
configure the nntphost variable, but too many people complained about it not
working "right".  I would simply like to destroy all evidence that it is
even supposed to be able to do anything with news.

---

From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 31 Dec 1995 22:46:35 GMT

Tim Pierce ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Jonathan and DearOldDad <[email-masked]> wrote:

: >... the problem is that this group name is 
: >comp.mail.pine not comp.news.pine and my description of it says something 
: >like for discussions about the pine mail program or something to that 
: >effect.

: I see.
: Am I allowed to conclude, then, that the whole of Pine's support
: for Usenet reading and posting constitutes a bug?

You may conclude whatever you wish; All I meant to say was that PINE for
all it's merits as a mail agent is not the best newsreader available, and
if one insists on using it for usenet posting and reading, then when it
asks you if you want to also post this reply, and you answer (y)es, don't
be surprised if your (r)eply also gets posted.  If you only want to 
reply, not post, answer (n)o to the question.  Why is that so difficult?

Happy Holidays to y'all.   G'Day.
John

---

From: Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
Date: 1 Jan 1996 00:35:39 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Jonathan and
DearOldDad) writes:

>if one insists on using [pine] for usenet posting and reading, then when it

I think you missed the context and came in late for this discussion.
The email being posted to Usenet was often sent by people not using
pine.  Thus these people do not have the choice of answering yes or no
to pine's prompts -- they are NOT using pine to begin with.  It's other
people who get email from them who repost it to Usenet.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <[email-masked]>
==
"...Mark Crispin has the good sense to not blather away in
 newsgroups..." -- Wayne Hathaway