>On 3 Jul 1996, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>If we write things to be as permissible as possible, we have five...
>
> 1. Approved: in the headers.
> 2. Approved: as first line in the body, followed by headers and body of
> approved message.
> 3. Approved: as first line in the body, followed by rest of message.
> 4, 5. Approved: somewhere in body, followed by headers and body or just
> body.
>
> Now #1 is great if you want to send a posting without being asked for your
> approval. (Say, you're sending an announcement.) #2 is what approve uses.
> #3 is for poor souls who have pitiful mailer software that won't let them
> add to the header. #4 and #5 are for those whose mailers add junk, like
> CC:mail.
Perhaps 2 and 3 are reversed? Anyone can use the convenience of #3 to send
an announcement while using Pine or Eudora to send mail. #2 is critical for
moderators who use Pine or Eudora to handle list volume.
> Chan proposes disallowing #3. It's really only a convenience to keep
> things from being bounced to the moderator if the submitter knows the
> password and has a stupid mailer. I think it would be nice to allow it
> just because, but only if it can be done cleanly. Thoughts?
#3 was not part of 1.93. If it interferes with #2, then we should exclude
it, but I don't think the interference is guaranteed.
> Note that allowing both #2 and #3 introduces an ambiguity; how can you tell
> that what follows is headers or body? To solve this I propose that instead
> of Approved:, the string Approved-Body: be used in #3 to indicate that the
> body is approved but that the original headers be kept. This is added
> complexity, which isn't great since people with braindead software tend not
> to know much about what's going on but I can't see another way around it.
> We're adding capability here.
As I understood 1.93 (from the perspective of an active list-manager who
doesn't know PERL and never looked at the code), any line immediately
following the Approved: which also began with a single word followed by a
colon was assumed to be a header - the first line that began with a word
_not_ followed by a colon was considered the first line of the message body.
Actually, for some reason it also considered a line beginning with blank
space to be part of the header, so you couldn't indent the first line of the
first paragraph of a message. The first of these is a good way to do things.
Ken Menken
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