On 2004-Oct-22, at 13:45, Charles Lindsey wrote:
A file in mbox format cannot contain a news article. If the file is in
some "mbox-like" format, then it is up to the implementor of the
format to
make provision.
Why can't it be mbox files? There's lots of postings that I archive
locally. It looks to me like a news article in mbox format. What's the
difference?
Indeed so. The message you are now reading has passed through a
news-to-mail gateway and is therefore, by definition, an email message.
It may be considered as an email form your point of view. But you may
get the same message from a news server as its news version - and both
should share the same message-id, marking them as the identical
message.
On the other hand: what's a posting that I Cc: the same moment to
someone else? For one it's news, for the other it's mail, but it
started as both and is the same message. Almost every news reader is
able to manage both email and news since you can write both a reply or
a follow-up.
No. Email and Netnews are distinct media. 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.
You might be a hardliner (which is good on an RFC list, but should not
ignore the real world outside) that something had to be transported via
its mail or news protocol in order to qualify as mail or news. I wonder
how according to your definition something from your mbox still does
qualify as mail, since it is no longer on transport but arrived
somewhere.
For me even a printout of a e-mail still qualifies as an e-mail, since
- it was sent to a certain receiver
- has a message-id as electronic 'signature'
The difference of news and mail is more my understanding of the
processing where it differs (e.g. an open posting to everyone on many
servers I don't know vs. a 'closed' list or unique person). For one or
the other more or less rules do apply - while lots of these rules
should be extended and shared for both (such as References, Re:,
charsets etc.)
And if it absolutely MUST guess which medium it is from examination
of the
message, then a better discriminator would be the presence or
absence of a
Return-Path header, of a "^From " line.
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. But
absence
of either of those does not mean it is an email, so this mechanism is
no
more than a means of guessing (fairly reliably) to be used if other
methods are not available.
On the other hand Newsgroups would qualify as a good news indicator -
while the message may have been Cc-ed and thus is in fact an email.
But I lost track what for we do need to know the difference: If it's
here for me, I may add one or the other processing. But I can build a
posting from an E-Mail or do the opposit as well. It would not be good
behavior because of many reasons anyway (e.g. someone might be confused
because of a reply while he can't get the originated message).