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Re: [Nmh-workers] Changes to forw(1)

2016-10-15 08:59:14
Hi Ken

I admit I am not clear where Ralph stands on this particular issue;
perhaps the Marmite shortage is affecting things :-)

Marmite's basic ingredient is yeast sludge, a waste product from brewing
beer.  Give me the beer.  It's solely produced in Burton, which used to
have a large beer-brewing industry.  "Come friendly bombs and fall on
Burton!"  It's on my target list just above Twiglets.

Ralph's not so crazy on letting those headers get out, but he never
said that he wanted or didn't want a Nmh- prefix.

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2016-10/msg00096.html
I think `Nmh-' prefix is better on these nmh-directive headers if
everything else stays working as today.

I wandered off onto other options to try and trigger ideas that might be
acceptable to both camps.  And widen the problem a bit to consider
something that helps, or at least doesn't hinder, other problems.

Ideally,

    Allow the user to write any legal header and have it hit the wire.
    Ensure nmh-directive headers don't leak.
    Ensure nmh-directive headers don't clash with external headers.
    Catch typos in header names so they don't hit the wire.

Starting to use Nmh- from now on, having Nmh-* stripped by post(8), does
some of that.  Another alternative would be to consider all headers to
be nmh's fare; the user cannot put `Foo: bar' in a draft.  This would
mean we can continue to dribble over the namespace over time since it's
ours, all ours.  We can catch corruptions, `Subjct'.  And post can
ensure only known headers reach the wire, after correct encoding has
been applied.

The `escape' so users can still add their own headers could be another
nmh-directive header, e.g. «Wire: Foo: Bar».  I don't think any valid
header line from a user is an invalid header value, so it can just have
a new header key prefixed?  (I'd probably go for `X' for external to
save the clutter.)

Also ... if we are having post(8) scrub out headers with an Nmh-
prefix, we could also have it scrub out any header, like Attach:,

No, because users may have a reason to add headers unknown to nmh.

we could have it put in a X-Mailer or User-Agent header.  It looks
like that was never standardized for Email, but it comes from HTTP and
there was an Internet-Draft here to use it for Email:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-melnikov-email-user-agent-00

"This Internet-Draft will expire on April 24, 2014."  Also,
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/search/?name=melnikov&sort=&rfcs=on&activedrafts=on&by=group&group=
doesn't list it or an RFC conversion.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy

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