Subject: Re: #1313 Newsgroups and reserved characters

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 14:20:23 GMT

In <[email-masked]> "Forrest J. Cavalier III" <[email-masked]> writes:

>Charles Lindsey wrote, in part:
>> 
>> No, we told him he SHOULD NOT. If he inadvertently does, then it will be
>> propagated if there are are further proper crossposts, otherwise it will
>> only be accepted at sites where that group exists (i.e. those that are
>> party to the "private arrangement"). That all seems OK to me.
>> 

>Why can't we let the "private arrangements" fall outside the standard?

Because, having created the notation, we don't want normal MUAs and
servers to refuse to accept it (claiming that it is 'non-standard').
People who enter into "private arrangements" will still expect their MUAs
to work with the arrangement. So we say that _generating_ the notation
should only be done by servers for the benefit off their own 'private'
clients.

>Why even discuss how "contractual" those arrangements must be?

Agreed. We don't say that (apart from saying it is a 'private' matter).

>Besides: if I have a private heirarchy, I may want to configure my relayer
>to reject articles which are cross-posted to private newsgroups (either inbound
>or outbound.)

USEPRO makes it clear that relayers MAY reject anything they like for
reasons of site policy (MUST or no MUST). What they can't to is to relay
it in an altered form.

>In the draft, that violates a MUST.  That's a problem with the draft.

Hmmm! You have a point there, and a deviation from USEPRO.

You could argue that "MUST accept" does not imply "MUST propagate", but
that is a bit thin.

So I would suggest (in the two places, for "[+-]" and for "_") either

   "MUST be accepted (subject to site policy)"
or
   "SHOULD be accepted".
I think I prefer the "SHOULD".

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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From: Seth Breidbart <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 15:17:47 -0400 (EDT)

> I think I prefer the "SHOULD".

I'd prefer something like "MUST NOT be rejected for this reason
alone".  If they want to reject for some other reason, fine.

(Which is the RFC that specifies a mailswerver MUST NOT reject a
message because the HELO argument doesn't resolve to the sending IP?
That's the sort of wording I'd want.)

Seth

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 22:17:03 +0200

Seth Breidbart wrote:

> Which is the RFC that specifies a mailswerver MUST NOT reject
> a message because the HELO argument doesn't resolve to the
> sending IP?

Near the bottom of http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2821#page-39

Frank

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From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 10:34:30 GMT

>alone".  If they want to reject for some other reason, fine.

Isn't that, more or less, the meaning of "SHOULD"? And in any case, if
there is a MUST reject elsewhere, it will trump any SHOULD.

But I am not averse to such a wording, though I think I would prefer

   "SHOULD NOT be rejected by news servers on that account [alone]".

>That's the sort of wording I'd want.)

The wording in RFC 2821 (which Frank drew our attentio to) is:

   However, the server MUST NOT refuse to accept a message for this
   reason if the verification fails: the information about verification
   failure is for logging and tracing only.