Keith Moore wrote:
behavior for mail-to-NetNews gateways should also be specified.
Transparent, "Expires:" can be kept as is (modulo magic SP in news)
my concern here is that (as best I recall) in NetNews, Expires
pretty much means the message will get deleted after that date.
Yes, that is what *expiration* does, depending on the server and
the group. But servers are in now way forced to honour Expires:.
Expires: is only a recommendation roughly matching your proposed
semantics. Quoting the MISSREF-blocked RFC (section 3.2.5):
The Expires header field specifies a date and time when the poster
deems the article to be no longer relevant and could usefully be
removed ("expired").
NOTE: This header field is useful when the poster desires an
unusually long or an unusually short expiry time.
expires = "Expires:" SP date-time CRLF
See the remarks under Section 3.1.1 regarding the syntax of
<date-time> and the requirements and recommendations to which it is
subject.
NOTE: The Expires header field is also sometimes used in Email
with a similar meaning; see [RFC2156].
I haven't looked at netnews in years but I seem to recall that
expires used to be used mostly with periodic postings like FAQs
that were reissued (and perhaps revised) on a regular basis.
Possibly. But FAQs typically use "Supersedes:" for this purpose.
"Supersedes:" is a combination of a cancel-message for article A
posting a replacement article B. And news servers are also free
to ignore "Supersedes:" and cancel-messages => local policy.
Frank