From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Mon Jul 19 2004 - 20:13:21 CDT
Frank Ellermann (nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de):
>It would be bad to forward this article without adding the
>missing Control: cancel <40FBED16.3436@xyzzy.claranet.de>
If you want the article to be a control message, put in the control
header. Don't try to shoehorn more structure into an unstructured header.
>Either the injecting agent adds the missing Control: header,
>or it rejects all Subject: cmsg without Control: header, or
>it encodes Subject: cmsg on the fly if there is no Control:
>header.
Why should it reject an article with a valid subject? Just because you
didn't insert the control header to actually perform the action you appear
want performed?
There is no "missing" when it comes to a Control header. Either it is
there and the article is a control message, or it is not there and it is
not. There is no "it ought to be there and I know better than the
author...".
>Fowarding it as is won't work, because then some old servers
>will follow RfC 1036,
Replace broken software.
>Of course all injecting agents _must_ support either reject
>or encode for Subject: cmsg foobar, but they could also add
>the missing Control for Subject: cmsg cancel <x>.
According to our draft, at least, 13.01, it MUST NOT do this, since that
would be construing "Subject: cmsg" as a request to perform that action.
I notice that this does not appear to have made it into the latest (00)
draft. It appears that consensus has been tossed on this.