From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jan 17 2000 - 03:53:43 CST
In <ylbt6ojrep.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>> The "unparseable" is covered by #3, which requires legal contents to
>> mandatory headers. But should we say something about dates in the
>> future? It would be hard to agree any exact margin of allowed error.
>INN has used one day as the fuzz for quite some time; that should allow
>even the most egregious time zone errors. We probably do want to say
>something about articles dated in the future, since if they're allowed
>they end up bypassing the defenses against accepting articles again (most
>servers are set to keep a record of old articles for about as long or a
>bit longer as the gap they allow in Date headers, so they can accept
>articles with dates in the future more than once).
I have augmented that piece in Section 5:
In order to prevent the reinjection of expired articles into the news stream,
relaying and serving agents MUST refuse articles whose Date header predates
the earliest articles of which they normally keep record, or which is more
than 24 hours into the future (though they MAY use a margin less than that 24
hours). Relaying agents MUST NOT modify the Date header in transit.
That makes it a MUST for both past and future errors. Is that what you
want, or is future merely a SHOULD?
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5