Subject: Re: #1416: USEPRO 3.9: Reinjection and Injection-Date

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:59:52 GMT

In <[email-masked]> Russ Allbery <[email-masked]> writes:

>Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]> writes:

>> what's current practice for email gateways on incoming messages? Do they:

>> - keep the Date: header and accept rejection for old articles?
>> - modify the Date: header if the article is rejected on submission?
>> - modify the Date: header in all cases?

>I think it's hard to get a read on what all gateways do, since there are
>so many different implementations and they're not really discussed in a
>common place.  All of mine keep the Date header, though.

Well that's what I had always assumed gateways (I think we are thinking
mainly of mailing list expanders here) would do (read: I have never
spotted one changing anything, though I have not looked that hard).

>I'm not sure what Mailman does.

Your message to which I am replying arrived with

    Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 14:27:35 -0800

Is that identical to what you submitted? I believe this lists uses
Mailman.

I have carefully set the Date header on this message to be:

    Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:59:52 GMT

Will people please report if it arrives exactly like that?

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email-masked]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

---

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:21:50 -0800

Charles Lindsey <[email-masked]> writes:
> Russ Allbery <[email-masked]> writes:

> Is that identical to what you submitted? I believe this lists uses

Uh, I don't know what Mailman's mail to news gateway does, I mean.  Which
I don't think this list checks.

I do know that it always replaces the message ID and generates a new one
for the newsgroup, though.  (And then doesn't change References.)

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

---

From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 21:34:43 GMT

>I don't think this list checks.

Sure, but Harald's original question related to gatewaying involving mail
only AIUI, just to see what precedents mail has already established.

>for the newsgroup, though.  (And then doesn't change References.)

Arrrrrgggggh!. They need to read your gatewaying texts in Usepro :-) .

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:22:07 -0800

> spotted one changing anything, though I have not looked that hard).

Mailing list expanders are, in general, not mail-to-news gateways.

                 Harald

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 18:53:06 +0100

Charles Lindsey wrote:
 
> I believe this lists uses Mailman.

AFAIK Paul uses majordomo, see also
http://gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.ietf.usenet.format

It needs a manual intervention of the list owner to disable
mails from the list.  But what mailing lists do with a Date
isn't related to Harald's question about mail2news gateways.

> Will people please report if it arrives exactly like that?

Yes, my UA displays 18:59:52 local time, that's correct.
Your "raw" article as seen and archived on GMaNe is here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.usenet.format/31586/raw

But GMaNe is very far from any typical mail2news gateways,
it's a unique concept, combining nntp2list + list2nntp and
similarly http2nntp + nntp2http. 

Frank

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From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:24:47 +0100

> - modify the Date: header in all cases?

GateBau '94 (and apparently also '97) don't mention to update a Date:
http://www.elektron-bbs.de/files/dfue/dokument/gatebau.94

But of course GateBau '94 isn't exactly any "current practice"... :-)

Frank

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From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2007 11:29:07 GMT

>Mailing list expanders are, in general, not mail-to-news gateways.

Indeed, but I thought the purpose of your original question was to
ascertain what current practice was with regard to altering the Date
header in various mail systems, to see whether it offered any useful
precedents for how we should proceed.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 22:58:19 -0800

> precedents for how we should proceed.

I was asking for the behaviour of mail-to-news gateways.

Since it's been a fairly common occurrence to have "disconnected" mail from 
laptops being sent a few days after they were composed (certainly far more 
common than similar news postings), and nobody has identified any 
mail-to-news gateway that alters the Date: header, we can probably conclude 
that the issue of getting articles bounced because the Date: header is too 
old causes so little pain that nobody's bothered to do anything about it.

That is food for thought.

               Harald

---

From: Richard Clayton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 09:18:09 +0000

In message <8BA5E677ED1CB11AD2A7BF7A@[10.71.2.170]>, Harald Tveit
Alvestrand <[email-masked]> writes

>old causes so little pain that nobody's bothered to do anything about it.

I rather suspect that when anyone complains the sysadmins roll their
eyes and ask what it is that is not understood about the word "news" ?

We have one "regular" poster in demon.ip.support.turnpike (the self-help
group for users of the Turnpike email/news client) who is often two to
three months behind in their reading and commenting [and who apparently
works offline and then posts everything in large batches]...  there is
considerable animosity about this behaviour (everyone else has moved on
to other topics, and the large number of posts suddenly appearing from
one person is an annoyance in itself...).

>That is food for thought.

I am quite sanguine about weeks old articles failing to be propagate
well, and so sensible newsservers give immediate feedback and fail to
accept them.  It is in my view a Good Thing that their original date of
writing is recorded and they are rejected on that basis. Hopefully,
before resubmission, the author will reconsider whether their article is
still necessary, or can still be posted without revision.

Don't forget as well, how batteries may fail and hence so many articles
were apparently written in the small hours of 1st January 1970 !

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 12:21:22 GMT

>old causes so little pain that nobody's bothered to do anything about it.

The evidence, such as it was, that I gathered in my experiment seemed to
indicate that Dates which were stale by up to 6-8 days seemed to propagate
pretty normally (but I was only able to monitor them at a few sites,
because auto-responders to the *.test groups seem to be very few and far
between these days). Stuff older than that did seem to get lost, however.

More of a problem was that some injecting agents (notably NIN) seem to
reject at around 4 days stale (I had to inject elsewhere for my
experiment).

>That is food for thought.

Well we agreed in USEFOR to go ahead with Injection-Date, so we should
continue with that. But it would be useful to have some response to my
reply to Russ's proposal, since I was basically in agreement with his
final scheme (modulo some minor quibbles, and the need for further
discussion of "Magic" exceptions).

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:56:08 +0100

> were apparently written in the small hours of 1st January 1970 !

Some folks intentionally set their Date to "today 00:00 local time" (or
similar) for privacy reasons.  IIRC that was also an option in at least
one UA.  The whole issue is somewhat irrelevant if servers follow the
recommendation in s-o-1036 (9.2) to use a history of at least one week.

Frank