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From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Unofficial Re^n Patch for B News 2.11
Summary: Not a good thing at all.
Message-ID: <1989Sep17.175525.661@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 17 Sep 89 17:55:25 GMT
References: <14665@bfmny0.UU.NET> <7120@ki4pv.uucp>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 32

tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) writes:
>tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET writes...
>) [patch to edit "Subject:" headers in inews]
>I am not entirely convinced that it is polite for the transport agent
>to go in and edit the user-supplied subject of his message.

I'm entirely convinced that this is a Bad Thing. If the subject line is
not RFC compliant (and it really isn't, since Re: isn't used to lead the
Subject: line), sending mail to the sender is probably the Right Thing
to do, since they definitely have broken software. But I'm opposed to
rewriting headers on the fly under any circumstances. The only exceptions
are, IMHO: gatewayers, who often need to rewrite headers; Path: which
needs to be rewritten; and Xref:, which is a local header (and is
probably in the wrong place anyway).

The first rule is: Thou Shalt Not Rewrite Headers, unless such rewriting
is _explicitly_ allowed by the appropriate RFC. You can ignore headers,
ignore errors in headers, send mail to people with broken headers, etc.,
but rewriting them is out of bounds. Trashing messages because the headers
are bad is also a big no-no unless the headers are SO damaged that the
message cannot possibly be handled correctly (no Message-ID: for instance).
This is all, of course, IMHO,  but I hope that the rest of the net agrees,
because it seems to me that this is what the net should be doing: sending
what is written, as it was written, whenever it's possible to do so.

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well.