Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!rpi!rpi.edu!tale From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: All these title lines! Message-ID: Date: 29 Jul 89 22:57:36 GMT References: <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <14734@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> Sender: usenet@rpi.edu Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu Lines: 109 In <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu (Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) writes: MR> Just one quick question: Hey -- you asked _two_ questions, Bub! (For the humour impaired => :-) MR> How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:', MR> 'Sender:', and 'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the MR> net? Are they really important? I have been using news for 2 MR> years now and I am still perplexed about this! RFC (Request for Comments) 1036 describes the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages and explains all of the "acceptable" headers in a USENET message. It supercedes RFC 850 which had been the previous guidelines for message formats. The required headers as specified by the RFC are "From", "Date", "Newsgroups", "Subject", "Message-ID" and "Path". Optional header lines include "Followup-To", "Expires", "Reply-To", "Sender", "References", "Control", "Distribution", "Keywords", "Summary", "Approved", "Lines", "Xref" and "Organization". Here is a summary of what they mean: Required: From: the electronic mailing address of the person who sent the message Date: the date the message was originally posted to the network Newsgroups: the newsgroup(s) in which the message belongs Subject: tells what the message is about Message-ID: a unique identifier for the message Path: the path which the message took to reach the current system Optional: Reply-To: mailed replies to the author should go to this address Sender: present only if submitter manually enters a "From" line Followup-To: follow-up messages to the net are to be posted here Expires: suggested expiration date for the message References: (required for follow-ups) any messages prompting submission of this message Control: a special line for behind-the-scenes network upkeep Distribution: alter the distribution scope of the message Organization: short phrase describing organization to which sender belongs Keywords: well-selected keywords to identify the message Summary: a brief summary of the message Approved: required for messages to moderated group and some control messages Lines: the number of lines in the body of the message Xref: indicates where the other copies are for a crossposted message The four headers which you mention are all optional, so you can just leave them blank. You should nearly always leave "Expires" blank; many sites will expire an article regardless of what this line says anyway, due to abuse by some people. Also note that the standard disallows the '(' and ')' characters as part of the user's full name, so Mark might want to change the way "(Ninjabutler)" is delineated to some other characters since it has a random possibility of not being compatible with some software out there. Changing the parentheses to single or double quotes would probably be a good choice. Mark then notes in <14734@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> MR> In my last posting the lines WERE empty, but were removed when the MR> message was posted. One of them, the 'Sender:' line, was filled MR> in with news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU (which I guess is our news MR> server), but only filled in after I posted! MR> What is going on? Most news software thankfully remove header lines which have no associated value. Occasionally some are filled in or changed; in an NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol, RFC 977) environment "Sender" is usually provided as the owner of the news software on the host machine. "Date" is provided by the posting mechanism too; usually any value which appears there when the article is posted by the user to the network will be replaced with the correct time of the actual posting. Before I take off for a splendid bicycle work-out, let's take a quick look at two header lines which appeared in Mark's message: MR> Keywords: they were empty when I last posted MR> Date: 28 Jul 89 22:49:54 GMT MR> Expires: 28 Jul 89 22:49:53 GMT MR> References: this one was empty too MR> Followup-To: you guessed it this one was blank too "Expires", as was mentioned earlier, is best left alone. At some sites, though, Mark's article is going to be extremely short-lived; it was posted later than it was supposed to have expired, too. "Keywords" has no real restriction for what can appear there. It is a good idea to make them "well-chosen" though. The particular string which was used here could have actually made an okay "Summary" line. "References" should contain a space-separated list of message-ids, oldest in the thread first. Mark's second message could have used "References: <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>". "Followup-To:" should contain a valid newsgroup name, or multiple newsgroups separated by commas. Typically what appears here is the first newsgroup of the "Newsgroups" line for a crossposted article. The keyword "poster" is also accepted to mean that no follow-ups should happen to the net. "you guessed it this one was blank too" is in general not a good thing to put there, but in the interests of this discussion it made sense. Hope this helps clear some things up. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))