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From: sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: LET'S NAME THE GUILTY POSTING SOFTWARE!!!
Message-ID: <6068@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: 19 Jun 91 05:43:18 GMT
References: <2857E736.3519@tct.com> <1991Jun15.194129.25394@vlsi.polymtl.ca> <285E730F.4EC0@tct.com>
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In article <285E730F.4EC0@tct.com> chip@tct.com (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>Neither rn nor trn guarantees that the article it generates is valid.
>However, a C News site will reject an invalid article after it is
>submitted by rn or trn.

The responsibility for validating the headers should be the software that
posts the software into the system. If the headers are not valid, then the
posting software should generate an error message immediately. The posting
software for the systems I am familiar with is called inews. It is called
by user posting front-ends such as Pnews and postnews.

Unfortunately, some news transports spool posted articles for later
processing by the posting software. In this case, the poster may not 
know the article had invalid header lines.

An analog with mail is that the mail transfer agent validates the headers
and returns the mail if headers are invalid. The user agent (which might
just be a text editor) may or may not have any such checking. This is as
it should be.

As far as I know, news transports don't have the "mailer-daemon" feature
of mail. I think there has been some discussion of this elsewhere. Hopefully,
something this useful will find its way into today's news transports to
help deal with this problem.

-- 
Stan           internet: sob@bcm.tmc.edu         Director, Networking 
Olan           uucp: rutgers!bcm!sob             and Systems Support
Barber         Opinions expressed are only mine. Baylor College of Medicine