From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 06 2004 - 17:33:51 CDT
In <878ydx7s0k.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>You still seem to be under a significant misapprehension concerning the
>nature of this problem. All that is necessary is that the Subject header
>begin with "cmsg" and a space. The remainder of the Subject header need
>not resemble in any respect a valid control message; just beginning with
>"cmsg" and a space will be sufficient to cause the message to effectively
>disappear at many sites or be rejected (namely any site running any
>version of INN prior to 2.4).
Ah! That has not been mentioned before. Does the article turn up in one of
the control.* pseudo groups then?
But I still don't see that significant harm arises. Sure, you have a
confused user whose article seems to have disappeared into thin air. But
if you forbid Subjects starting with "cmsg" (messy), then you will still
have confused users who cannot understand why their perfectly "normal"
article bounced.
I think all it actually needs is a warning somewhere (possibly in USEPRO
alongside the place where it says servers MUST NOT any longer implement
the old behaviour, or possibly in USEAGE) to the effect that articles with
Subjects beginning with "cmsg" may sometimes fail to propagate to some
not-yet-compliant servers.
That is essentially the situation as it exists today, and I have not heard
of any instances where it has happened or caused any actual harm. If it
ain't (that) broke ... .
And if you follow that approach, then the problem (if any) will eventually
go away with no further action needed. It is going to take as long for
servers to be upgraded to reject such articles as it is going to take for
servers to be upgraded not to respond to them as control messages.
-- 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@clerew.man.ac.uk 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