Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 10:58:53 -0400 From: Ken Hornstein <k...@pobox.com> Message-ID: <20161014145854.ab15644...@pb-smtp2.pobox.com>
| Ralph, kre? Would you like to clarify your positions for thick-headed | fellows like me? As was pointed out in anothr message, I didn't take any position on the filtering queston (other than not just blindly filtering anything we don't understand). Forthis in general, I think we need to keep in mind that there are two very different kinds of fields involved - first there are fields that are supposed to be user to user (or UA to UA, or similar) and then there are those things that are internal implementation issues within nmh (or some other mailer) and are just used for passing info from the user to his/her UA (and which a GUI UA would probably accomplish via a menu selection or button, or something, rather than by using fields, or anything else using text.) The latter type ought to be filtered out (where possible) the former not. I inferred there was some confusion about this, as there was mention made (when discussing using the nmh- prefix) of what would mmh (and a bunch of other UA's) do if they wanted similar functionality - with the assumtion being that this problem was similar to (or even the same as) the arguments that eventually doomed the X- concept (a decision with which I completely agree- X- always was a dumb idea, it just took hindsight to really appreciate that.) But that's not relevant here at all, the fields in question are ones which are internal to nmh, if mmh wants a a field to do attaches, it can use mmh-attach or mmh-attach-file, mmh-attach-message ... (whatever they want) and so (in the obvious similar way) does every other UA that desires something similar. If nmh used just Attach: and mmh wanted to implement the same strategy, and also chose Attach, there would be (or should be) no conflict, not even if they use wildly different syntaxes for the field-body. It is also different, in that the X- concept had exactly one string for everyone (excpet the IETF) to use, embedding a manufacturer/prdouct/... string (in some semi-rational common way - such as a prefix) avoids many of the problems. It stll has the "that's a good idea, we should standardise that for everyone" problem - but that's not at all relevant to internal use fields that are not supposed to escape (it is exactly because there is no point in standardising some internal glue of nmh's, and that no-one else ever should, or likely would, care how the internals of nmh work, that we are even discussing changing the # lines in the body into Attach (or nmh-attach) fields in the header. That is, none of this is anyone else's business. In general, I think I kind of prefer the prefix version, and then (as much as is possible) scrubbing everything with that prefix - and of course, using it only for internal nmh fields (even changing anno to use nmh-xxx for the added fields might be a good idea - it would complicate scan format file which would need to deal with both the old and new, but that's tolerable I think. On the other hand, I don't like the :attach suggestion at all - it looks like it might be nice, but it results in message files (before processing with send/post/mhbuild or whatever actually deals with this stuff) that are not syntactically valid messages - and would (I think) result in a command like: show last +drafts potentially issuing errors about the malformed message. That I think would be a big mistage - assuming users don't screw up the editing (I sometimes add cc; headers...) message files should always be valid messages, or as close to it as possible. The reasons I prefer the prefix version, are that it makes it trivial to filter all such internal fields (again, as much as possible) and that it doesn't prevent users using Attach (or whatever) as a header field should some other mailer (at the recipient) uses that for some totally unrelated purpose than the one we are discussing. There's close to zero chance that some other mailer will want nmh-anything as a field. I don't care much about the accountability question - I don't see that as important at all - I am an exmh user (who also uses MH commands - the nmh versions of those), and while I haven't done it to the exmh I am currently using, one of my normal standard mods is to kill the X-Mailer stuff (and not because it has the X- prefix ... "X-Mailer" is pretty much the de-facto stadard for UA identification - I don't think I have ever seen a MUA that uses User-Agent (though I guess some of the browser oriented ones might.) Rather, I usually delete it as I consider it no-one else's business which software I use - if my mail is arriving in some form that causes problems, I want the recipients to tell me about it, not look at some header info and just throw up their hands and say" "oh that sh*thouse xxx mailer, always been broken, forget it." Nor am I interested in contributing (via stealth really) to someones count of how many messages/users are using each of the MUAs that exist. kre _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list Nmh-workers@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers