From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Fri Jul 31 1998 - 02:49:17 CDT
On Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 10:16:08PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com> writes:
> In the sense that mail to news gatewaying, when done right, preserves the
> message ID of the *e-mail* message, perhaps with some sort of
> deterministic munge to avoid message ID collisions with other gateways of
> the same list, so now you're making assumptions about the relationship
> between a generator of an *e-mail* message ID and who should be able to
> cancel. That makes your stance much less clear-cut.
No, there still is no problem. The cancel authority I refer to would
give the sysadmin of the site where the mail is sent from the authority
to cancel, if the domain name is in the message-id. Do you perceive
that as a problem? The gateway also has that authority, as injector.
The rule is simple, "Use a domain in your message-id, the admin of that
domain can cancel." I'm not saying we have to have that rule, but I
don't see anything wrong with it, since if you don't like it you can
use another domain in your message-id, notably one you control. It's just
a rule that gains some efficiency and I don't think bestows cancel on anybody
who should not have it. I think if you put somebody's domain in your
message, you take the risk the owner of that domain can cancel your
message.
>
> > News to mail to News gatewaying is something that is generally
> > deprecated.
>
> Pardon me? I do news to mail to news gatewaying all the time and have
> absolutely no intention of stopping.
It tends to be the source of a lot of problems on USENET, or has in the
past. The news articles would go into mail, get munged in various
ways such as rewriting of msgid, date or from, but most commonly
message-id, and then when sent back into news, would cause duplicates.
(That assumes they went to the broad net. Of course news to mail to news
for internal newsgroups is not a problem.)
It's not impossible to do a working news to mail to news gateway, but
a lot of people did them wrong, so in the broad net they tend to be
deprecated.
Signatures solve the problem because they force you to do it right or
the signature doesn't match.