[InterNetNews/inn] 32eb57: Fix the use of Auto-Submitted header field
Julien ÉLIE
noreply at github.com
Tue Jan 31 12:34:58 UTC 2023
Branch: refs/heads/2.7
Home: https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn
Commit: 32eb5787f1a4b8a9a89096d502cd48e17b066d0b
https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn/commit/32eb5787f1a4b8a9a89096d502cd48e17b066d0b
Author: Julien ÉLIE <Julien-Elie at users.noreply.github.com>
Date: 2023-01-31 (Tue, 31 Jan 2023)
Changed paths:
M backends/news2mail.in
M control/controlchan.in
M doc/pod/inn.conf.pod
M doc/pod/newsfeeds.pod
M nnrpd/post.c
Log Message:
-----------
Fix the use of Auto-Submitted header field
Use auto-generated for controlchan reports, and do not use that header
field at all for gatewaying (news2mail and nnrpd).
Thanks, Russ Allbery, for your wise thoughts:
The notifications sent by controlchan are not an autoreply to the
sender of the control message. They are a status report sent to the
news administrator about a change made (or proposed) on their news
server by a third party. As such, they're equivalent to the daily
report or the notification messages from innwatch. The fact that the
change to the server was initiated by a netnews message doesn't feel
horribly relevant. A "reply" by definition goes back to the sender
of the message; notification messages that go to third parties feel
inherently different.
Gatewaying (of which moderation is a subset) is yet a different thing,
and the Auto-Submitted header isn't appropriate here with any value.
These messages are not Auto-Submitted; they're, well, gatewayed.
This is equivalent to email forwarding; mail servers don't add
Auto-Submitted headers when they forward mails.
*If* we were encapsulating messages when sending them to moderators,
"Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" may be in the outer envelope, but
since we're transforming and forwarding a message, this is just part
of the message propagation path and thus should not be labeled with
Auto-Submitted. The message is not, in general, auto-submitted; it was
manually posted by the poster of the message, and we're just passing it
along to its ultimate recipient.
Also, on a more practical level, addition of this header is
potentially surprising to moderators. Their mail client may rightfully
downgrade or refile messages with Auto-Submitted headers, particularly
Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, since the vast majority of such messages
are vacation auto-replies that are of low importance or that people may
even auto-delete. There's some risk of confusing submitted posts for a
moderated group, which are relatively important mail, for relatively
unimportant mail like vacation autoreplies or automated status
messages.
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