On Fri October 22 2004 07:45, Charles Lindsey wrote:
A file in mbox format cannot contain a news article.
The newsreader rn and its derivatives and a number of other
newsreaders save news articles in that format, and can read
messages (which might be "news" messages or "mail" messages)
in that format.
There are plenty of hooks within IMAP to enable an implementor to
distinguish Email from Netnews.
No.
For example, it is customary to store news
articles in folders within a "#news" hierarchy.
No; they may be accessible from another subsystem via that
convention -- and it is merely a convention -- but as messages
may be freely copied from any folder that is readable to any
folder that is writable and/or moved among any writable folders,
folders may contain a mix of messages from various provenances --
with no way to tell what those provenances are. This has
been explained to you multiple times by multiple people.
Messages also carry flags
with them which can be used to distinguish various classes of message.
There is no "news" flag or anything remotely resembling
one.
c) it "got it from" an NNTP server after having passed through a
mail-to-news gateway
If it came from a mail-to-news gateway, then it was, by definition, a news
article.
I believe that case might apply for some people who read *this*
mailing list; N.B. this is a mailing list, not a newsgroup, and if one
insists on making a distinction, the messages sent by this list's
expander are unquestionably mail.
Indeed so. The message you are now reading has passed through a
news-to-mail gateway and is therefore, by definition, an email message.
Yes, and the message that it is a response to was also an email
message, whether or not you viewed it in a newsreader.
I see nothing in RFC 3458 of relevance to this matter.
Try actually reading the RFC -- it defines a field which can identify
one of several applications of the RFC 2822 message format; fax,
voice messaging, etc. If the applicability isn't clear to you, then
you can of course ask Ned for clarification, since he suggested it.
If it is in an
IMAP box, then it depends how it was put there, and that is a matter for
the IMAP implementor.
No. IMAP is a Standards Track protocol that handles messages;
"mail", "news", "hand-crafted" is immaterial. Human users using
a variety of standards-compliant UAs can copy/move messages
between folders at will, as many times as they wish, and there is
no way (or need) to track such movement. This too has been
explained to you many times, and you have been informed in
no uncertain terms that any attempt by you to try to impose
any such requirements on IMAP will not pass IESG muster.
It's handling "messages". When a message is being transported, it
might be transported via a news-specific protocol, or via a mail-specific
protocol, or via a protocol which is non-specific. Once it has been
transported, it is simply a message.
No. Email and Netnews are distinct media.
Some (but not all) transport methods are specific to one or
the other. Some (but not all) message header fields have
defined semantics for one or the other. But the basic format
is intentionally the same, for reasons of code reuse etc. that
are spelled out in RFCs 850 and 1036 (section 2 of each).
If a dual-use agent cannot keep
track of which medium it is handling, then it is broken, as is any system
which uses a non-specific protocol without suitable tagging.
What are "broken" are your ability to comprehend what has been
explained to you several times by several people, and your ability
to realize that your ability to ram your odd ideas down the IESG's
throats is nil.
Return-Path fields are only inserted by SMTP when making final delivery;
Hence the presence of a Return-Path (or of an equivalent "^From " line
arising from an mbox file) is a sure sign that it is an Email.
No; as usual you haven't been paying attention. A message having
been delivered by SMTP to a mail-to-news gateway may very well
still have a Return-Path field when it is transported by a "news"
protocol.