jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu (Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) (07/29/89)
Just one quick question: How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:', 'Sender:', and 'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the net? Are they really important? I have been using news for 2 years now and I am still perplexed about this! :-s <-- perplexed smiley :-) =============================================================================== UMBRELLASWORD throwingplatter PLATTERCOVERSHIELD - a ninjabutler's best friends Mark Alexander Robinson jarvis@eleazar.dartmouth.edu HB 1407 jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire 03755 ===============================================================================
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (07/30/89)
In <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu
(Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) writes:
MR> Just one quick question:
Hey -- you asked _two_ questions, Bub! (For the humour impaired => :-)
MR> How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:',
MR> 'Sender:', and 'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the
MR> net? Are they really important? I have been using news for 2
MR> years now and I am still perplexed about this!
RFC (Request for Comments) 1036 describes the Standard for Interchange
of USENET Messages and explains all of the "acceptable" headers in a
USENET message. It supercedes RFC 850 which had been the previous
guidelines for message formats. The required headers as specified by
the RFC are "From", "Date", "Newsgroups", "Subject", "Message-ID" and
"Path". Optional header lines include "Followup-To", "Expires",
"Reply-To", "Sender", "References", "Control", "Distribution",
"Keywords", "Summary", "Approved", "Lines", "Xref" and "Organization".
Here is a summary of what they mean:
Required:
From: the electronic mailing address of the person who sent the message
Date: the date the message was originally posted to the network
Newsgroups: the newsgroup(s) in which the message belongs
Subject: tells what the message is about
Message-ID: a unique identifier for the message
Path: the path which the message took to reach the current system
Optional:
Reply-To: mailed replies to the author should go to this address
Sender: present only if submitter manually enters a "From" line
Followup-To: follow-up messages to the net are to be posted here
Expires: suggested expiration date for the message
References: (required for follow-ups) any messages prompting submission
of this message
Control: a special line for behind-the-scenes network upkeep
Distribution: alter the distribution scope of the message
Organization: short phrase describing organization to which sender belongs
Keywords: well-selected keywords to identify the message
Summary: a brief summary of the message
Approved: required for messages to moderated group and some control messages
Lines: the number of lines in the body of the message
Xref: indicates where the other copies are for a crossposted message
The four headers which you mention are all optional, so you can just
leave them blank. You should nearly always leave "Expires" blank;
many sites will expire an article regardless of what this line says
anyway, due to abuse by some people.
Also note that the standard disallows the '(' and ')' characters as
part of the user's full name, so Mark might want to change the way
"(Ninjabutler)" is delineated to some other characters since it has
a random possibility of not being compatible with some software out
there. Changing the parentheses to single or double quotes would
probably be a good choice.
Mark then notes in <14734@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
MR> In my last posting the lines WERE empty, but were removed when the
MR> message was posted. One of them, the 'Sender:' line, was filled
MR> in with news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU (which I guess is our news
MR> server), but only filled in after I posted!
MR> What is going on?
Most news software thankfully remove header lines which have no
associated value. Occasionally some are filled in or changed; in an
NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol, RFC 977) environment "Sender" is
usually provided as the owner of the news software on the host
machine. "Date" is provided by the posting mechanism too; usually
any value which appears there when the article is posted by the user
to the network will be replaced with the correct time of the actual
posting.
Before I take off for a splendid bicycle work-out, let's take a quick
look at two header lines which appeared in Mark's message:
MR> Keywords: they were empty when I last posted
MR> Date: 28 Jul 89 22:49:54 GMT
MR> Expires: 28 Jul 89 22:49:53 GMT
MR> References: this one was empty too
MR> Followup-To: you guessed it this one was blank too
"Expires", as was mentioned earlier, is best left alone. At some
sites, though, Mark's article is going to be extremely short-lived;
it was posted later than it was supposed to have expired, too.
"Keywords" has no real restriction for what can appear there. It is
a good idea to make them "well-chosen" though. The particular string
which was used here could have actually made an okay "Summary" line.
"References" should contain a space-separated list of message-ids,
oldest in the thread first. Mark's second message could have used
"References: <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>".
"Followup-To:" should contain a valid newsgroup name, or multiple
newsgroups separated by commas. Typically what appears here is the
first newsgroup of the "Newsgroups" line for a crossposted article.
The keyword "poster" is also accepted to mean that no follow-ups
should happen to the net. "you guessed it this one was blank too"
is in general not a good thing to put there, but in the interests of
this discussion it made sense.
Hope this helps clear some things up.
Dave
--
(setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (07/30/89)
Sender: is also used when a secretary sends a message on behalf of his boss, for example. The From: line is detected as not matching the effective sender, and a Sender: line is added by the news/mail software to indicate who effectively sent the letter. The presence of Sender: news@somemachine is very often pure noise; it is often a side effect of the use of NNTP to post messages, when inews is called by news, which does not match the From: line. We don't see Sender: mail@somemachine on all our mail messages, do we... Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US (Chip Rosenthal) (07/30/89)
jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu (Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) writes: >How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:', 'Sender:', and >'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the net? Are they really >important? It is important that you (almost always) DO NOT fill in the "Expires:". Most times, use of this header is rude. More in a moment, but I want to make this point clearly at the outset. Second question first - "no". However, sometimes you might want to use some of them. I will describe these headers, so that you can decide when the circumstances arise whether or not to use them. How you go about adding these headers depends upon the news posting program you use. For example, the "Pnews" program gives you these headers with blank values. You can just fill in the values. The "postnews" program doesn't provide such a boiler-plate, and you will need to manually add them in with the other headers it provides. Expires ======= Regularly (say nightly), every news administrator runs a program called "expire" on his or her system. This program searches out all the older news articles and deletes them. The local site administrator gets to specify exactly how long articles should hang around before being expired. In my case, I run a half-dozen different expires a night, expiring stuff nobody reads quickly, keeping other things around longer. An article which contains an "Expires:" header with a date value expires on that date, and not when I want it to. Therefore, flagerant use of this line is rude, because you don't let me administer my system the way I want to. On the other hand, "Expires:" headers are often used justifiably. One place is "news.announce.newusers" so that the monthly informational messages hang around for a month. References ========== When you post a news article in response to somebody else's, your article is called a followup. The "References:" header points to the original article to which your refers. It does this by taking the value in the "Message-ID" field of the original message. You can have followups to followups, and in which case you can have "References:" headers with many references in them. Generally, when you hit "F" or "f" in your news reader, it automatically creates this line for you. You shouldn't ever have to worry about it. Unfortunately, most of the available news reading software isn't able to do anything with this header. If they did, theoretically you could easily follow through a discussion thread. However, this is complicated by the fact that a lot of software out there doesn't formulate the "References" header properly. Sender ====== Generally, you post your own news articles. But this isn't always the case. Maybe a friend wants to post a message from your account. Maybe a daemon runs on your machine which gateways messages into news. In both these cases, you don't want the "From:" line to reflect the owner of the computer account, but rather it should say who wrote the message. Therefore in these cases you would want to insert a "From:" line rather than take the usual one. The news software notices when the person in the "From" line isn't the owner of the account, and automatically inserts a "Sender" line to add some accountability. You should never insert a "Sender" line. Even if you do, the news software will wipe it out. Followup-To =========== Suppose you post a message in comp.lang.c saying that NULL should be "-1". Then suppose I post a followup saying that's silly. Then I go on to say "furthermore, it is stupid that XENIX defines NULL as (char *)0". Well, we are now starting to wander from a general c discussion to the XENIX implementation. Maybe it would be a good idea to get the XENIX folks involved. By default, any followup messages to mine will go to "comp.lang.c". However I can specify a "Followup-To:" header to make followups go somewhere else. The argument to this header is either a newsgroup name, or a comma delimited list of newsgroups. This purpose, redirecting followups to another newsgroup, is the most common use of the "Followup-To" field. There is one other use. Modern news software recognizes a magic value of "poster" in this field. This says that followups shouldn't be posted to USENET, but rather they should be mailed to the poster (i.e. author of that message). Older software won't recognize the meaning of "poster" but will instead try to post to a newsgroup called "poster". Since there is no such thing, the posting will fail with an error message, which is the same net result. In summary, you should never have to insert "References" and "Sender" fields. If they are appropriate, then your news software should do it automatically. You should probably never use an "Expires" header, in almost all cases to do so is rude. The "Followup-To" header, however, is something you might want to use from time to time if a discussion is wandering in a direction more suitable for a different newsgroup. There is a document entitled "Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages" which is part of the standard B2.11 USENET software distribution. This document formally defines all of the USENET headers. You should refer here for additional information. If you can find a file called "standard.mn" (maybe it's somewhere like /usr/src/news/doc), you can print off a copy of this by saying something like: nroff tmac.n standard.mn | lp -- Chip Rosenthal / chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US / Dallas Semiconductor / 214-450-5337 "I wish you'd put that starvation box down and go to bed" - Albert Collins' Mom
shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) (07/30/89)
On 30 Jul 89 04:35:51 GMT, chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US (Chip Rosenthal) said: Chip> Unfortunately, most of the available news reading software isn't Chip> able to do anything with this header. If they did, Chip> theoretically you could easily follow through a discussion Chip> thread. However, this is complicated by the fact that a lot of Chip> software out there doesn't formulate the "References" header Chip> properly. Most, but not all. GNUS (a newsreader which runs under GNU Emacs and uses NNTP) supports tracing a thread of discussion by looking up (by Message-ID) the last article in the References field. (For GNUS users who haven't noticed this feature, the function is normally bound to the "^" key.) When this works, it works nicely. Changes in the Subject line do not matter. Unfortunately, some posters or software remove references, or leave them blank, so it can't always be traced. Nor can forward traces be done. But it is a nice feature. Deven -- Deven T. Corzine Internet: deven@rpi.edu, shadow@pawl.rpi.edu Snail: 2214 12th Street, Troy, NY 12180 Phone: (518) 271-0750 Bitnet: deven@rpitsmts, userfxb6@rpitsmts UUCP: uunet!rpi!deven Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) (07/31/89)
In article <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> jarvis@northstar.dartmouth.edu (Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) writes:
: Just one quick question:
:
: How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:', 'Sender:', and
: 'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the net?
I presume that you are not asking about the mechanics of doing this;
I hope that you know your editor by now! (And that your posting
software makes those headers available for editing.) I'm assuming
that you are asking what you should put into those fields.
Here is a short summary of what they mean and what you can do with
them:
Expires:
This field is a hint to each site as to how long the message
ought to be kept. If blank, each site will use some default
that will likely be related to how much disk space they have
in order to decide how long they keep the message around.
Well endowed sites will likely keep it around for two weeks,
others will keep messages around for a shorter time (e.g.,
three days on my system). However, some messages should be
kept around longer. YOUR MESSAGE ISN'T ONE OF THEM! I'm not
being obnoxious here; I'm pointing out that the chance is so
slim that your message really ought to have a longer expiry
date that we don't need to consider it. Generally, only
messages in moderated newsgroups should get one of these and
the moderator is the one who puts it in.
However, since it would be rude not to tell, what goes in
here is something that looks like what goes in the Date:
field. What I do is run the Unix `date' command, edit the
results to look like what I want, and paste it here.
References: <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
This one contains the message id's of the messages that this
one is a followup to. A message that starts a thread will have
a blank References: line. Your news software will generally
fill this in for you when you follow up to a message. On
occasion, it is desirable to make one of these lines up, or
to shorten one of them (as in when rn barfs over a long one);
in that case, this line should contain a list of message id's
separated by single spaces. You should include the message id
of the first message of the thread in the list, as many of
the messages in the middle as you can (opinion) with the
latest messages preferred, and definitely the last message in
the thread.
Sender:
(Following is my understanding; I haven't used the field
myself and so may have some of this wrong.) This field is
used when you are sending a message on behalf of another.
What it contains is the address of the person actually
sending the message as opposed to who the message is from. So,
if you are joe@turkey.gov and you are sending a message for
john@turkey.gov, the From: line (which you would have to add
yourself) would say `From: john@turkey.gov' and the Sender:
line would say `Sender: joe@turkey.gov'. If I read my docs
right, if you add your own From: line, the news posting
software will put the right thing into the Sender: line for
you.
Followup-To:
This indicates where you want messages that are followups to
your message to be posted. It should be a list of news groups
like what goes on the Newsgroups: line. If this line would be
the same as the Newsgroups: line, leave it blank.
(opinion) You should use this line any time you cross-post.
(opinion) You should only follow up to one newsgroup.
Note that not all news software handles the Followup-To: line
correctly. To help people who are stuck with that kind of
software, should you put something in the Followup-To: line,
you should also add at the beginning or end of your message a
line saying something like: "Followups have been directed to
<whatever you put in the Followup-To: line>".
---
Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.combarnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (07/31/89)
In article <14733@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, jarvis@northstar (Mark (Ninjabutler) Robinson) writes: >How can I fill in the empty titles 'Expires:', 'References:', 'Sender:', and >'Followup-To:', above, when I am posting to the net? Are they really >important? The only headers a novice should edit (IHMO (In My Humble Opinion)) are: Newsgroups: - Remove all inappropriate newsgroups Follow-Up: - A reply will go to this (these) newsgroups Summary: - A one-line summary of the article Keywords: - Some important keywords in your article Reply-To: - This is your preferred address Newsgroups: and Followup-to: limits the number of newsgroups you post to. Please keep this down to the fewest number of newsgroups possible. Some news archivers prefer the first newsgroup in the list to be the most appropriate one. Summary and Keywords are used by some readers that use it to determine if reading the rest of the article is a good idea. When at home using a 1200 baud modem, this is important. Reply-To: You may want to put your REAL return address here provided you know what your real address is. (Don't guess!) If your News reader is not set up properly, then you may have to edit this field. When someone replies to you, the first choice is the Reply-To: field. Next choice is the From: field, and next choice is the Sender: field. If you want mail to be delivered to a particular machine, specify it there. Some people have set up their news reader to use the return path. I only use this as a last resort, but we have a UUCP router and a name server. The syntax to Expires: is subtle, and you will very likely get it wrong it you guess. When the news admin runs expire to remove old articles, it complains about bad dates in hand-generated Expires: field. -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crdgw1.ge.com> a.k.a. <barnett@[192.35.44.4]> uunet!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett barnett@crdgw1.UUCP
julian@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Julian Cowley) (08/05/89)
In article <321@vector.Dallas.TX.US> chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US (Chip Rosenthal) writes: [disussing the use of the keyword "poster" in the Followup-To header line] >Older software won't recognize the meaning of "poster" but will >instead try to post to a newsgroup called "poster". Since there >is no such thing, the posting will fail with an error message, >which is the same net result. Which software does this? I've done tests using rn and determined that it doesn't know how to handle the poster keyword. julian@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu uunet!nosc!humu!uhccux!julian julian@uhccux.bitnet University of Hawaii at Manoa
chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US (Chip Rosenthal) (08/08/89)
julian@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Julian Cowley) writes: >In article <321@vector.Dallas.TX.US> I wrote: >[about using the "Followup-To: poster" magic cookie] > >Which software does this? I've done tests using rn and determined that it >doesn't know how to handle the poster keyword. Sorry to mislead you. It is up to the various news reading/posting programs to see that the message has a "Followup-To: poster" header, and request you to submit your response via mail rather than a followup. The standard USENET programs do this. The "readnews" program will automagically route your response via mail rather than posting. The "postnews" program will refuse to post the followup. However, "rn" doesn't recognize this. However, as I mentioned, what happens in this case is that your program trys to post the message to a newsgroup named "poster", and as you probably say, this fails with an error message saying that there is no newsgroup called "poster". I went back to the "rn" source and added this capability. The following patch will change "rn" to prohibit the "f" and "F" commands if the message has a "Followup-To: poster" header. Index: respond.c *** respond.c.OLD Mon Apr 11 15:56:31 1988 --- respond.c Sat Aug 5 03:27:44 1989 *************** *** 1,5 **** --- 1,8 ---- /* $Header: respond.c,v 4.3.1.5 85/09/10 11:05:00 lwall Exp $ * + * Sat Aug 5 03:24:20 1989 - Chip Rosenthal <chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US> + * Changed "followup()" to refuse when "Followup-to" is poster. + * * $Log: respond.c,v $ * Revision 4.3.1.5 85/09/10 11:05:00 lwall * Improved %m in in_char(). *************** *** 355,360 **** --- 358,370 ---- { bool incl_body = (*buf == 'F'); + if (htype[FOLLOW_LINE].ht_minpos >= 0 ) { + if ( strcmp(fetchlines(art,FOLLOW_LINE),"poster") == 0 ) { + puts("\nSorry - poster has asked for replies to be mailed."); + FLUSH; + return; + } + } artopen(art); tmpfp = fopen(headname,"w"); if (tmpfp == Nullfp) { -- Chip Rosenthal / chip@vector.Dallas.TX.US / Dallas Semiconductor / 214-450-5337 "I wish you'd put that starvation box down and go to bed" - Albert Collins' Mom