From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 06 2004 - 21:19:08 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:
> 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?
Yes (for INN), unless it's rejected entirely for being an unknown control
verb.
> But I still don't see that significant harm arises.
I'm afraid that I can't do much about that.
> 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 doesn't seem unreasonable to me, but that isn't the same as saying
that I agree with it. I don't have a particular solution that I favor;
I'd rather leave it to other people to make specific proposals on the best
way of handling this.
It would be useful to tell gateways somewhere about the trick of encoding
cmsg, but that might belong in the gatewaying RFC that Lars and I were
talking about rather than in any of our current documents.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>