[ntp:questions] forwarding
Brad Knowles
brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Sun Mar 13 14:11:15 UTC 2005
At 6:13 AM +0000 2005-03-13, Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> Loops are certainly an important concern, but traditionally they were
> dealt with by the gateway injecting a gateway-specific header such as
> "X-Loop: XXXX".
The problem is that some gateways strip what they consider to be
unnecessary headers, and certainly our gateway would not recognize
the "X-Loop:" header that may have been added by another gateway, nor
would they recognize ours.
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that there is one and only one
bi-directional gateway. Given the history of such systems, we have
to assume that we have to protect ourselves, our subscribers, and all
the readers of the newsgroup against situations where a rogue gateway
causes our normally-good gateway to operate in a manner that is
highly destructive.
> My newsreader (Gnus v5.10.6) uses the "References:" header to walk up
> the thread. It asks the nntp server (in my case news.sonic.net) to
> hand it the articles with the mentioned Message-Id's. Are you saying
> that mailman expects it to do something differently?
It should be able to fill in the missing details by looking at
all the articles that are referenced. My understanding is that the
Zawinksi algorithm does this. The fact that a particular article
doesn't exist on the server should not prevent it from being able to
fill in the rest of the details. It should be able to infer the
correct thread positioning based on incomplete data.
--
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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