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From: mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.bugs
Subject: Expiration Dates On Articles
Message-ID: <629@codas.ATT.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Jul-86 15:05:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: codas.629
Posted: Thu Jul 10 15:05:38 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Jul-86 04:35:18 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Altamonte Springs, FL
Lines: 32
Xref: watmath net.news:5086 net.bugs:839

I was recently approched by the administrator of a neighboring site, and
asked why the command "find /usr/spool/news -mtime +X -print" (where X
was some number larger than the number of days given to expire) will find
articles. The answer was obvious, pre-set expiration dates. However our
curriosity had us look up such articles. We found articles that won't
expire UNTIL THE TURN OF THE CENTURY! And they come from such passive
newsgroups as net.jokes and net.women (passive because you wouldn't
expect anything there to last that long, unlinke net.announce or
mod.announce.newusers) Below is a list of six articles I found, the
search consisted of all articles I had on my system that were posted
before the month of June this year. My default expiration date is 14 days:

article id		    date posted			expiration date
--------------------------  ----------------------      ----------------------
<316@phred.UUCP>	     1 May 86 04:38:28 GMT	31 Dec 99 06:00:00 GMT
<279@ubu.warwick.UUCP>	    10 May 86 18:51:09 GMT	 1 Aug 86 00:00:00 GMT
<4933EV9@PSUVMA>	    15 Apr 86 05:15:30 GMT	 6 Oct 86 07:00:00 GMT
<302@phred.UUCP>	    17 Apr 86 09:51:56 GMT	31 Dec 99 08:00:00 GMT
<218@phred.UUCP>	    17 Mar 86 17:50:41 GMT	31 Dec 99 08:00:00 GMT
<132@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>   7 May 86 12:38:30 GMT	21 Dec 99 02:00:00 GMT

I would like to hear from the people who posted these, why they
set such extrenuous (1 Aug 86 isn't as bad as 31 Dec 99) expiration
dates.

(Yes, I *do* know about "-I" on expire, that's not the point).
-- 
    ___
   /   \		Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL
  | RPI |		...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel
  |  .  | 
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