[ntp:questions] forwarding

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Sun Mar 13 03:54:46 UTC 2005


At 3:37 AM +0000 2005-03-13, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:

>  What is the worst that will happen if "mailman" left the darn message
>  id alone?  The second non-conforming message with the same ID would be
>  dropped.

	There's also the risk of getting into a loop between our 
mail-to-news gateway and one run by someone else.  Given how fast 
these things operate, this could result in a flood of hundreds of 
thousands or millions of messages in a single day, assuming the 
servers don't roll over and die first.  Given two rogue mail-to-news 
gateways plus ours, the growth would be exponential.

	That's just the biggest single risk I can come up with off the 
top of my head, and given the fact that there are so many operations 
out there like Gmane, and most of them are poorly done and leak their 
content all over the entire world, I think that this is a risk that 
we cannot possibly afford to take.

>  I'd prefer if the gateway penalized the broken MUA, not the rest of us
>  who have to live with broken threading just on the off chance that
>  some idiot MUA uses non-unique message-ids.

	If your newsreader implemented the threading algorithm correctly, 
then by looking at the various fields within the message, it should 
be able to deal with the changes to the message-id.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.



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