ietf-822
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Re: Newsgroups

2002-02-06 05:12:35

In <p05100318b885d5bd8ff0(_at_)[130(_dot_)237(_dot_)150(_dot_)141]> Jacob Palme 
<jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> writes:


At 19.21 +0000 02-02-04, Charles Lindsey wrote:
Well Usefor is addressing the "Newsgroups" in e-mail problem. But
basically you are right. A header is usually invented first of all for one
particular protocol. When it comes to be adopted into another, it usually
will be found to be not a perfect fit (though one should try to use as
much or the original as possible). So we have adopted MIME (written for
email) into Usefor, but we have had to flesh out a few corners,
discourages certain usages, and so on (but not half the amount of change
that HTTP had to make to it).

The problem was that "Newsgroups" in e-mail had two different
meanings:

(a) The same as in news, indicating which newsgroup this message
    has been sent to.

(b) In personal answers to news articles, indicating in which
    newsgroup the message appeared which this is a personal
    answer to.

Usefor blesses the first usage (it MAY be used) and deprecates the second
(SHOULD NOT).

It also provides the Posted-And-Mailed header, which can be used in
conjunction with (a).

BTW, Posted-And-Mailed is a good example of a header that has crept into
common usage in spite of the lack of any standard. As far as I can tell,
it arose from discussion on one of the news.software.* newsgroups, at
about the same time as the Mail-Copies-To header (both these are now
fairly widely deployed). It is a good example of a header that would have
gone into a provisional register, if such had existed at the time.

-- 
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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Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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