From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Aug 09 2002 - 05:16:02 CDT
On Thu, 8 Aug 2002 16:38:57 -0400 (EDT)
Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> said...
>
> On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, J. Porter Clark wrote:
> > The draft is a little unclear (to me) as far as encapsulated articles
> > sent to moderators, in this way: Are we moderators guaranteed that
> > one email submission will contain exactly one article, or it is
> > possible (even remotely) that one email will contain a batch?
Normally, the email will contain exactly one encapsulated article and
nothing else.
However, suppose someone wants to send a "covering letter". For example,
it is posted to two moderated groups. Moderator #1 sends an email to
moderator #2 something like:
"Dear Moderator #2
I have received this article for group #1, and it is fine by me.
But it is also posted to your group. If it is OK by you, then
please go ahead and post it. I have attached article in question as
an application/news-transmission to this message."
So in that case the mail you received would be a MIME multipart with
two parts, the second being the encapsulated article. It is up to you
whether to bother with such things. But an intelligent User Agent that
knew how to deal with an application/news-transmission properly (or even
with a plain application/octet-stream) should make this just as easy to
handle as the single case. You just click on the attachment and have it
sent to a file (or whatever you do with it) in exactly the same way as
if it had been on its own.
Likewise, an enthusiastic poster might send you half a dozen articles
encapsulated in the one email. Again, it is up to you whether to bother
with such unusual complications.
>
> Hmm. This probably should be clarified (as should the semantics of the
> "usage" parameter of the "application/news-transmission" content type).
>
> The draft should specifically call for "usage=moderate" (batches being
> legitimate only when "usage=relay" is present or implicit) and/or should
> make it clear that only one article may appear within.
Actually, that is what it already says. There is a facility
for bunching up a large batch of articles within a single
application/news-transmission, but only when the usage is 'relay'.
When the usage is 'moderate' this facility is not available, so one
encapsulation can contain only one article. But nobody can stop you from
sending several encapsulations in one email, as in the example above,
but again moderators can always choose to reject them on principle in
that case.
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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