Subject: User-Agent and Message-ID fields

From: Nicolas Christin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 12:04:07 -0500 (EST)

Hi,

I recently posted a patch on comp.mail.pine, but I realized that the
pine-info mailing-list was probably a better place to get feedback from
people who are actually potentially interested in this kind of details.

The short sotory is, I wrote a patch for 4.53 that
1. removes the leading Pine.ABC.x.yz from the Message ID, and
2. replaces it with: User-Agent: Pine/x.yz (ABC) in the headers (no, I'm
not using my customized pine at the moment, so don't look in the headers
of this mail they won't show anything interesting.)

The motivation for this was to be strictly compliant to Usenet Format,
which recommends a User-Agent field be present in the headers. (It's a
"SHOULD", not a "MUST", but still...)

However, I noticed that, when examining my sent-mail folder, Pine
would angrily tell me that my newsgroup post may or may NOT have made
it. After inspection of the source, I found that this was caused by a
so-called "kludge" in rfc822.c. So, I modified my initial patch to take
care of that issue, but more importantly, I believe that this portion of
the patch (the modifications to rfc822.c and imap4r1.c) could be used to
improve on the aforementioned "kludge". (The patch itself is available
at <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~nicolas/software.shtml#pine>, if you
want to look at the code. This is not rocket science, far from it.)

Basically, pine tries to detect if a newsgroup post was made by a
"winning mail program" in order to consider it as non-bogus. However,
that code was written somewhere between 1995-1998. Since then, a number
of reputable mail/news programs have opted for putting their agent
information in the User-Agent field rather than embedding it in the
Message-ID. Sure enough, "User-Agent" is not part of RFC [2]822, but I
honestly think it is worth checking if one has been specified, and if
so, if it belongs to a reasonable mail and news program. In the patch
I propose, I only check whether the User-Agent field contains "Pine/"
(since that's what the patch provides in the first place) but this could
be easily extended to other checks.

Does anyone have any opinion on this?

Best,
-- 
Nicolas
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From: Matt Ackeret <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 10:47:28 -0800 (PST)

>it. After inspection of the source, I found that this was caused by a

This isn't really related, but the "reply by mail, post, both" question really
really bugs me.

I guess I appreciate that it's asking me, but I typically don't both email and
reply to Usenet.. and I don't use pine for Usenet, thus I don't want to have
pine suggest posting to me.

Basically I wish that I could make that question go away and it would always
just reply by email.