Hello David, ruby-talk, c.l.r.,
The remaining problem seems to be subject lines with "Re:" in them,
when there are no In-Reply-To and References: headers. This
apparently makes the NNTP server flag the message as a followup and
then be unhappy because there's no reference.
My further investigations proved that this is really the problem. The
symptoms are the same as with the first problem (I get a 441 - "Followup
without a reference" - when posting the mail to the newsgroup), but this
time the solution is non-trivial. The first case ("In-Reply-To" flag in
header but not "References" flag) was solved by adding the missing flag
by duplicating the message-id of the "In-Reply-To" flag. In this case
both flags are missing. The MUA which was used by Austin Ziegler adds
"Thread-Topic" / "Thread-Index" flags to the header which are supposed
to solve the threading, but this is not applicable to Usenet.
This leads to the conclusion that we have three possible solutions:
- Add an "In-Reply-To"/"References" flag to the header by using the
message-id of THAT mail => the message would appear on c.l.r., but
threading would be broken
- drop the message on the floor at the gateway => ruby-talk / c.l.r.
are inconsistent
- my solution: as mua's are more or less allowed to do whatever they
want my fear is that we get more and more of such borderline cases
so the only solution is that we establish identical posting policies
on both the mailing-list host and the gateway/nntp host we're posting
too. (ML-Maintainers? Any Comments on this one?)
Btw: I won't be able to re-feed the messages which were not posted to
c.l.r. because my suspicion that they get rejected because of their age
became true. Sorry for that, but DAB will probably put them on a http-
accessible location.
Kind regards,
Dennis Oelkers
--
Dennis Oelkers | Webadministration | Zentraleinrichtung Rechenzentrum
TU-Berlin | EN-Gebaeude, K042 | Telefon: 030-314-25029
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