Attachments

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2018-06-04 16:34:08 +0000, Peter Pearson wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Jun 2018 20:20:32 +0200, Peter J. Holzer <hjp-python at hjp.at> wrote:
> > On 2018-06-03 13:57:26 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> >> (For good reasons, attachments are dropped when messages are distributed
> >> on the forum.)
> >
> > By "the forum" you mean Gmane? (I got the attachment over the mailing
> > list)
> 
> Comp.lang.python is a usenet newsgroup, also accessible through a mailing
> list (and, I think, a web interface).  NNTP, the Network News Transfer
> Protocol, does not provide for attachments.

This is not true. NNTP doesn't care about the content of the message at
all (as long as it contains the few mandatory headers). As a case in
point, Jach Fong's message got here fine (including the attachment) via
this path:
news.luga.at!news.albasani.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.szaf.org!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail
So it was 6 or 7 times transmitted via NNTP with the attachment intact.

There is a rather strong *convention* to avoid attachments in many news
hierarchies (comp.* being one of them), and some newsservers may filter
them. But clearly none of the 7 newsservers mentioned above does this,
at least not for *text* attachments (they might do it for binary
attachments).

So we have determined that "the forum" is not the mailing list and not
the newsgroup (Jach's message appeared on both with the attachment). Ben
uses Gmane, which makes it likely that he is talking about a
(mis)feature of Gmane,

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) |                    | because we have much more sophisticated
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         | management tools.
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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