From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Thu Jun 24 2004 - 23:07:07 CDT
Russ Allbery wrote:
> There was a fairly long discussion in news.software.nntp a while back
> about multipart postings. It's hideously unlikely that anyone will
> actually use multipart/partial as the primary method of indicating
> multipart postings on Usenet, at least without *also* relying on the
> subject hacks, because Content-Type isn't and probably never will be in
> overview information.
N.B. that's message/partial, not multipart/partial.
1. NNTP != all of Usenet. IMAP is also used, extensively, and doesn't
have that limitation. [any field or group of fields can be requested]
2. The overview extension to NNTP seems to have a number of limitations.
However, we can't solve NNTP issues here.
3. Subject hacks remain hacks. I have seen "[1/23]" etc. used in spam
on Usenet, where there were no multiple parts associated with the
message in question. So the practice is highly dubious at best.
About all we can constructively accomplish is to point out the existing
standard mechanism for partitioning a large message into pieces and hope
that the transport folks will take care of relevant matters in their areas.