Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!mp.cs.niu.edu!rickert
From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Subject: Re: LET'S NAME THE GUILTY POSTING SOFTWARE!!!
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.172544.32267@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
References: <285E730F.4EC0@tct.com> <6068@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1991Jun19.154645.11885@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1991 17:25:44 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <1991Jun19.154645.11885@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <6068@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber) writes:
>>Unfortunately, some news transports spool posted articles for later
>>processing by the posting software. In this case, the poster may not 
>>know the article had invalid header lines.
>
>I'd be curious to know what transport systems do this.  C News, as shipped,

 One that comes to mind is the mini-inews supplied with NNTP.  I hope the
new version that Rich Salz announced will solve some of these problems.

>doesn't -- the posting validation is done by inews, which runs immediately.
>(We have talked about having the *validated* article spooled for later
>processing rather than processed immediately, although at the moment it
>is done immediately.)  Unless we've overlooked something, an article which
>gets through inews should pass relaynews's checks.

  Yes.  What you have overlooked is the date checking.  An article that passes
inews has a syntactically valid date.  But the date may not be within the
time limits used by the local relaynews.  Because of the way inews invokes
relaynews, the actual date checking is done by relaynews at the next news
site down the line, and this is where the article will be silently dropped
with no feedback to the Author.  This is particularly a problem with mail
gatewayed into news, where wild dates (from unset PC clocks, for example)
are common.

 Yesterday, for example, my Cnews rejected 16 articles (older than 30 days)
received from a feed which is also running the latest Cnews.  On occasion
when I have checked, these articles had dates which were far too old for
the feed, but sneaked by because of this loophole.


-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940
