Date parsing

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Sat Sep 7 21:22:14 UTC 2002


bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery  <rra at stanford.edu> wrote:

> | I'm curious if you still feel that way with the results of Andrew's
> | research.  Rejecting malformed Date headers gets rid of a ton of spam and
> | job spew.

> What I kind of hoped for was a status flag if the date could be parsed,
> so that sites could apply policy to it. One might drop it, one might
> drop it in feed and rewrite it in post (ignore the politics, but it
> would be technically possible). I'm more interested in extending choices
> if possible, and letting policy determine which choices are made.

I guess I'm not quite sure what you're arguing for.  Do you think INN
should accept articles whose Date headers couldn't be parsed at all?  If
so, how do we prevent reinjection and slow loops, or do we just not worry
about them?

Or are you hoping that someone will write a new date parser that will
parse any human-readable date?  I suppose it's possible, but I'm not
volunteering to do that work; the existing date parser doesn't even come
close, and that's a bunch of really tricky programming.

> | I guess my personal opinion is that I'd like to require RFC 2822 dates
> | in nnrpd and use the same parser but with the above-mentioned tweaks
> | in innd for article acceptance.  Andrew's analysis pretty much
> | convinced me that any lossage from doing that will be well into the
> | noise.

> Unfortunately that would lose some mail I really want to see, which I
> gate into news for easier reading (better tools).

It would lose mail that you're currently accepting into a system that uses
parsedate as the parser?  Do you have any examples that I could look at?
(Most of the dates that the loose routine would parse that the strict one
cannot are mistakes by *news* software, not by mail software.  Plus, when
gatewaying, you can always try to parse the Date header and if that fails,
replace it.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.


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