add "Auto-Submitted: auto-generated" to generated EMails?

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi Russ,

>> With your details about "auto-replied", mails from controlchan seem to
>> belong to the auto-replied category instead of auto-generated.  As a
>> matter of fact, the reports (actions taken or that should be taken) are
>> sent when receiving a control message.
>> 
>> I would then use "Auto-Submitted: auto-replied" for controlchan.
> 
> 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.
> 
> I think Auto-Submitted: auto-generated is correct for these.

OK, I had mixed feelings about it when switching to "auto-replied". 
I'll revert back to "auto-generated" for controlchan.



> Gatewaying (of which moderation is a subset) is yet a different thing, and
> I don't think the Auto-Submitted header is appropriate here with any
> value.
> 
> *If* we were encapsulating messages when sending them to moderators, I
> could see an argument for Auto-Submitted: auto-generated in the outer
> envelope, but since we're transforming and forwarding a message, I think
> 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.

Indeed.
Incidentally, speaking about encapsulating messages in an 
application/news-transmission Content-Type for the moderation process, 
how could we advance in that subject?

I remember we talked about it in 2014 in news.software.nntp:
   <87h9ylcin6.fsf at hope.eyrie.org>

"""
 > When RFC 5537 states that "[encapsulating proto-articles within a
 > Content-Type of application/news-transmission] SHOULD NOT be used unless
 > the moderator to which it is being forwarded is known to be able to
 > handle this method", how can news servers know that they can post such
 > contents in practice?

They can't.  This bizarre situation is the result of us totally bailing on
this problem in USEFOR.  We couldn't figure out a good way of handling the
transition, so even though we all felt that we needed some sort of formal,
reasonable protocol for forwarding messages, we never managed to come up
with a reasonable way to go from the current world to the new world.

I suppose that moderators could individually request new behavior and we
could tag that information in some sort of central metadata file that we
could sync, but no one has even started working on that so far as I know.
"""

I can open a new thread in news.software.nntp; I'm wondering whether 
there currently are moderating programs which gracefully cope with that 
kind of encapsulation.  And of course, if there's a need, how to go 
forward (central metadata file provided by moderators.isc.org's admins, 
or another proposal).



> Also, on a more practical level, I think 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.  I think 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.

That's a good point.



> All the other changes look fine; it was just those two that didn't sound
> right to me.

All right, thanks for having had a look at the discussion.
As Grant also seems to be fine if we do not add that header field for 
gatewaying, I'll revert the changes to news2mail and nnrpd.

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Le bonheur, c'est de continuer à désirer ce que l'on possède. »
   (Saint-Augustin)