From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Wed Jul 07 2004 - 22:21:25 CDT
Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Jul 2004, Bruce Lilly wrote:
>
>>>So what trouble, exactly, is caused by having news assign syntax and
>>>semantics where 2822 just sees an unstructured blob?
>>
>>A user agent then cannot determine whether to apply the RFC 2822/MIME
>>syntax and semantics or the _other_ syntax and semantics.
>
>
> A user agent which is in doubt about the nature of a particular message
> can apply the least restrictive of a compatible set of definitions,
You seem to be saying that if there is a MUST NOT and an implicit MAY,
that the implementation is free to apply the "MAY" (i.e. the least
restrictive one) -- that seems to be incompatible with the meaning of
MUST NOT. Likewise for MUST vs. SHOULD NOT (the latter being less
restrictive). And MUST NOT vs. SHOULD. Also SHOULD NOT vs. MAY.
What do you propose in the case of SHOULD vs. SHOULD NOT and MUST
vs. MUST NOT -- they are equally restrictive and contradictory?
> I should have been more precise about this... The applications I'm
> thinking of assign their own syntax and semantics to the Subject header in
> some situations, using it for commands to the software. They would appear
> to work fine, and are in active use today, and I've never heard of anyone
> accusing them of violating standards.
The ones I'm familiar with use the message body rather than the Subject field,
e.g. the following three:
with the single word
unsubscribe
in the body of the message. This last method assumes that the "From:"
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