[SpamCop-List] Re: patent-fr

[Philippe Verdy (n.o-s.p.a.m+abuse)]

"Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p(n.o-s.p.a.m+abuse)@wanadoo.fr> a écrit dans le 
message de news: do1m6h$jbo$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> "Ant" <not at home.today> a écrit dans le message de news: 
> do197i$cm5$1 at news.spamcop.net...
>> "Philippe Verdy" wrote:
>>
>>> Plonk me if you wish, but I won't change back this, due to antiquity
>>> mail/news readers.
>>
>> It's not really about old newsreaders, but more to do with the
>> accepted behaviour in newsgroups.
>
> Wrong. There does not exist any such *accepted* behaviour:accepted by 
> whom? (Note that "behaviour" is related to the content of messages, 
> respect of persons, topics, and crossposting policies, but not about the 
> technical ways through which the messages can be posted.)
>
> MIME is a RFC standard like newsgroups (but MIME has evolved more 
> gracefully than NNTP which looks like a dynosaur today). MIME was intended 
> to support all message formats independantly of the transport used (so it 
> was created for NNTP too, not only for SMTP). Its updates do represent a 
> better view of state-of-the-art solutions foraddressing international 
> issues.
>
> News readers that donot interpret correctly the plain-text flow and 
> *display* long lines instead of wrapping are not helping users.
>
> Also I have not seen any Spamcop policy about such required message 
> format.

For those interested in an ongoing proposed change to the very old RFC977 
(20 years old!). Look at 
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-nntpext-base-27.txt
(see the comments starting at page 104).

It is already accepted that conformance to MIME is highly desirable, but in 
fact the link to MIME already exists implicitly in RFC 977, because it 
references RFC850 that states that newsgroup messages should be compatible 
with Email (RFC850 speaks about ARPA Mail as an alternate transport for 
publishing orforwarding news messages using stadnard email and the 
"newsmail" format; it clearly states that NNTP headers are correlated to 
Email headers, and that NNTP message bodies are correlated to Email message 
bodies. MIME directly interfers with both of them).

The NNTPext-base extension (version 27) above discusses about 
interoperability problems, and correctly describes what is considered as 
best practices. It also states that NNTP implementations shouldbe8-bit 
clean, to support multiple charsets, and that MIME is the prefered method to 
encapsulate the charset and content-type meta-data specification.

Let's hope that this will address the problems that most users are 
experiencing, and that users won't resist to this change, when new clients 
will be written or updated to support the newly described best practices.