This proposal takes care of all my objections. It allows for communication
to humans, and it has reasonable defaults, and is not so complex that it
can't be understood by the readers of the list, since to them, A URL that
points to the policy or the natural language phrase is the most important
thing.
And the policy suggests that someone not using the standard should have
their rights respected.
Whereas I still doubt that a standard is needed at all, I am not going to
object to a standard that has reasonable defaults so that it can be
ignored. And it is not clear whether this standard should or should not
allow for the assertion of a compilation copyright. If someone wanted to -
they could code it as
List-ArchivePolicy: 1 (Compilation Copyright © 2002 example.com All
Rights Reserved)
Which argues that one may repeat the header because one may have multiple
comments (for example, an assertion of copyright and a URL pointing to the
long policy) but that the numeric value MUST always be the same if the
header is repeated, since programs should only parse the numeric, and they
might grab the first or last instance.
For legal purposes, it may be appropriate to claim that the comment SHOULD
be rendered using HTML Entities - this gives one a way to encode a
C-Circle. And if you do not render it correctly, :-), well, it was still
encoded.
Finally, it seems that the general standard for the headers would be:
List-Archive-Policy:
for headers, where bi-capitalization is meaningless because they are
generally to be compared in a case independent fashion, and at least some
header reformatters will blindly re-encode the original as
"List-Archivepolicy:" --- or did I miss (or fail to understand the
importance of) some important comments about namespace pollution?
It might be reasonable to suggest somewhere that an invitation to ask
permission is not an invitation to massmail - that it is inappropriate to
send massmail to the owner addresses. This won't stop inveterate spammers,
of course, but it may stop people who have questions as to what is appropriate.
They should be respected by a program no matter where they appear - in a
plain text section, in the mime headers, in the unlabled area that follows
the RFC822 headers and precedes the first mime headers, or in the top level
RFC822 headers. If they are put into a html section, or a section that is
encoded in a scheme other than seven bit ascii (uuencode, base64,
quoted-printable), they must be repeated in one of the above places for
programmatic access.
Or would it be simpler to simply require that the mail be plain text single
section?
At 05:20 PM 2002-08-20 +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
>After some more thought, I now propose the following:
>
>
>The machine-readable list-policies specification consists of one or
>more lines of text, which each consists of three parts:
>
>
>a) one of the field-names "List-ArchivePolicy:", "List-MirrorPolicy:",
> "List-RobotPolicy:", "List-CachingPolicy:", "List-GatewayPolicy:"
>
>b) an integer number in the range of zero to three
>
>c) a comment which explains the policy for humans
>
>
>Each of the field-names SHOULD occur only once.
>
>The meaning of the integer values is as follows:
>
>0 - States the policy that the activity is completely disallowed to
> third parties, and that no exception will be made.
>
>1 - States the policy that the activity is generally disallowed to
> third parties, but interested parties are invited to request
> permission, and such requests will be considered on a case-by-case
> basis.
>
>2 - States the policy that the activity is generally allowed under the
> condition that the first thing that is done with all postings is
> to remove any and all email addresses first, as a spam-prevention
> measure.
>
>3 - States the policy that the activity is generally allowed, without
> any requirements for removing email addresses.
>
>
>The meaning of the field-names is as follows:
>
>List-ArchivePolicy: - refers to mailing list archives which are
>published in some way, e.g. via the internet. (Regardless of
>the List-ArchivePolicy: value, subscribers MAY always create
>archives for their own personal use.)
>
>List-MirrorPolicy: - refers to making the content of the list
>available through some other subscription-based channel, like
>e.g. a newsfeed or another mailing list.
>
>List-CachingPolicy: - refers to making recent content of the
>list available for a limited time of a month or less.
>
>List-GatewayPolicy: - refers to submitting postings (which are
>made e.g. through a web-based form or in any other way) to the
>list.
>
>List-RobotPolicy: - refers to robots subscribing to the list, and
>processing the postings in some way. Such robots MUST NOT post
>to the list or send private mail to other subscribers except by
>explicit permission of the list-owner.
>
>
>Examples:
>
>A list with very liberal policies might use this:
>
>List-ArchivePolicy: 3 (everyone is welcome to archive this list)
>List-MirrorPolicy: 3 (everyone is welcome to mirror this list)
>List-GatewayPolicy: 1 (work together with us to prevent loops)
>List-RobotPolicy: 3 (robots are welcome but should keep quiet)
>
>Another list might use this:
>
>List-ArchivePolicy: 1 (ask: permission from the list-owner is needed)
>List-MirrorPolicy: 0 (this list should not be mirrored)
>List-CachingPolicy: 2 (cache postings for a month, help prevent spam)
>List-GatewayPolicy: 0 (direct submission of postings only)
>List-RobotPolicy: 2 (robots must help prevent spam)
>
>
>Default values:
>
>When not explicitly specified, List-ArchivePolicy:, List-GatewayPolicy:
>and List-RobotPolicy: have a default value of 1 (which means "don't do
>it without asking first"). If List-MirrorPolicy: and/or
>List-CachingPolicy: are not specified, then the value of
>List-ArchivePolicy: applies.
>
>
>
>For discussion....
>
>Major disagreements with this proposal can be discussed right here on
>list-managers, while minor issues of refining the language etc should
>be discussed on the rfc-discuss list:
>
>http://maillist.info/mailman/listinfo/rfc-discuss
>
>
>Greetings, Norbert.
>
>--
>Founder & Steering Committee member of http://gnu.org/projects/dotgnu/
>Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
>Tel +41 1 972 20 59 Fax +41 1 972 20 69 http://norbert.ch
>List hosting with GNU Mailman on your own domain name http://cisto.com
--
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of
nature!"
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
Follow-Ups:
References:
|
|
