From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 15:45:11 CDT
6. Optional Headers
6.1. Mail-Copies-To
The Mail-Copies-To header indicates whether or not followups to the
article should be emailed to the poster in addition to being posted
to Netnews and, if so, may provide an address to which they should be
sent. The content syntax makes use of syntax defined in [MESSFOR],
but subject to the revised definition of local-part given in section
5.2.
Mail-Copies-To-content = copy-addr / "nobody" / "poster"
copy-addr = mailbox
[<mailbox> allows only a single address. I might alternatively have said
<From-content> allowing several. Note that the default is in any case
Reply-To, which in general allows several. John Moreno provided the
following rationale for this:
The reasons for allowing an address are to allow the poster to specify a
special address as a destination for copies of posted replies and to
allow people posting with an invalid address to specify a valid address
to which to send a Cc. Only one address is allowed, so as to limit the
potential for abuse.
I am not totally convinced, especially about the "abuse" bit.]
NOTE: Some existing practice uses the keyword "never" in place
of "nobody" and "always" in place of "poster". These usages are
deprecated. Posting agents MUST NOT generate them, but followup
agents SHOULD observe them.
[I stuck my neck out a bit there, by leaving them entirely out of the
syntax. Is that agreeable?]
A followup agent MUST NOT (unless its user explicitly overrides it)
email a copy of the followup article to the author of the original
article if the Mail-Copies-To header contains the "nobody" keyword.
If the user explicitly overrides this provision, the followup agent
MUST/SHOULD/Ought to issue a warning to the user and ask for
confirmation.
[MUST/SHOULD/Ought? This hardly causes interoperability problems.
Perhaps that sentence is not needed at all. Opinions?]
A followup agent SHOULD (unless its user explicitly overrides it)
email a copy of the followup article to the author of the original
article if the Mail-Copies-To header contains a copy-addr or the
"poster" keyword. The copy MUST be sent to the address in the copy-
addr, and in the absence of that to the address(es) in the Reply-To
header, and in the absence of that to the address(es) in the From
header. The followup agent SHOULD also include a "Posted-And
Mailed: yes" header ().
[There is a suggestion that it should be allowed to include a Posted-
And-Mailed in the body instead of that header. But I do not like
specifying what body content should contain, and how would I interpret
such a possibility if the body were a Mime multipart?]
If this header is absent, a followup agent MUST NOT automatically
email a copy of the followup article, but the user MAY do so at his
discretion.
NOTE: This header is only relevant for posted followups to
Netnews articles, and is to be ignored when sending pure email
replies to the author, which are handled as prescribed under the
Reply-To header (6.1). Whether or not this header will also
find similar usage for replies to messages sent to mailing lists
is not defined by this standard.
6.2. Posted-And-Mailed
Posted-And-Mailed-content = "yes" / "no"
This header, when used with the "yes" keyword, is used to indicate
that the article has been both posted to the specified newgroups and
emailed, either to the author of the article to which this is a
followup (see the Mail-Copies-To header in section) or to the
recipient(s) identified in any To and/or Cc header that may be
present. The "no" keyword is included for the sake of completeness;
it MAY be used to indicate the opposite state, but is redundant
insofar as it only describes the default state when this header is
absent.
This header, if present, MUST be included in both the posted and
emailed versions of the article. The Newsgroups header of the posted
article MAY be included in the email version as provided for in
section 5.5.
[Well, do we want this header, or not?]
[MESSFOR] P. Resnick, "Internet Message Format Standard", draft-
ietf-drums-msg-fmt-07.txt, March 1998.
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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