Re: draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-02

[John Stanley <stanley@xxxxxxxx>]

"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>And the only last-ditch possibility left is to include something in the
>body of the message, such as:

>THIS ARTICLE HAS ALREADY PASSED ONCE THROUGH <name of gateway>.

>Which will look pretty ugly to people who see that in the body, but what
>else could be done to prevent the loop?

Unfortunately, this method is also very likely to prevent responses from 
that message to be gated. Once that string appears in the body, it is ripe 
for being quoted. Just as it was quoted in this response. 

You might think that you could simply look for that string at the start of
a line. But the "other medium" might not have the concept of "start of a
line"! Or it might change the lines somehow. Or something else. You cannot
rely on it appearing at the start of a line, or even remaining on one
line. In the same encoding. Or even in the same language.

Then you have to rely on the INCOMING gateway to look for this line and 
take appropriate action. If it does not, it will generate a news message 
with a different message id, which IS a DIFFERENT MESSAGE according to the 
news system. If your gateway treates messages with different message ids 
as the same message, it is broken.

If we are going to talk about gating articles into a horribly broken 
messaging system (one that has no concept of message identifiers), then we 
have to accept that it is broken and isn't our responsibility or within 
our ability to fix. Since it also requires enforcing structure on an 
entirely unstructured message element, it is impossible to accomplish.

If you thought the arguments were harsh when you wanted structure in an 
unstructured subject header, just think what it will be like when group A 
that uses "other medium" realizes that you are trying to enforce structure 
on THEIR messaging system's unstructured components.