s-o-1036 June 1994

3. Relation To MAIL (RFC 822 etc.)

The  primary  intent of this Draft is to completely describe
the news article format as a subset of MAIL's message format
augmented by some new headers.  Unless explicitly noted oth-
erwise, the intent throughout is that an article  MUST  also
be a valid MAIL message.

     NOTE:  Despite  obvious  similarities between news
     and mail, opinions vary on whether it is  possible
     or  desirable to unify them into a single service.
     However, it is unquestionably  both  possible  and
     useful to employ some of the same tools for manip-
     ulating both mail messages and news  articles,  so
     there  is specific advantage to be had in defining
     them compatibly.  Furthermore, there is no  appar-
     ent need to re-invent the wheel when slight exten-
     sions to an existing definition will suffice.

INTERNET DRAFT to be        NEWS                      sec. 3


Given that this Draft  attempts  to  be  self-contained,  it
inevitably  contains  considerable repetition of information
found in MAIL.  This raises the possibility of unintentional
conflicts.  Unless specifically noted otherwise, any wording
in this Draft which  permits  behavior  that  is  not  MAIL-
compliant  is  erroneous  and should be followed only to the
extent that the result remains compliant with MAIL.

     NOTE: RFC 1036 said "where this standard conflicts
     with  [RFC 822], RFC-822 should be considered cor-
     rect and this standard in  error".   Taken  liter-
     ally, this was obviously incorrect, since RFC 1036
     imposed a number of restrictions not found in  RFC
     822.   The  intent,  however,  was  reasonable: to
     indicate  that  UNINTENTIONAL   differences   were
     errors in RFC 1036.

Implementors and users should note that MAIL is deliberately
an extensible standard, and most extensions devised for mail
are  also relevant to (and compatible with) news.  Note par-
ticularly MIME [rrr],  summarized  briefly  in  appendix  B,
which extends MAIL in a number of useful ways that are defi-
nitely relevant to news.   Also  of  note  is  the  work  in
progress  on  reconciling  PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail, which
defines extensions for  authentication  and  security)  with
MIME, after which this may also be relevant to news.

     UNRESOLVED ISSUE: Update the MIME/PEM information.

Similarly, descriptions here of MIME  facilities  should  be
considered  correct  only  to  the  extent  that they do not
require or legitimize practices  that  would  violate  those
RFCs.   (Note that this Draft does extend the application of
some MIME facilities, but this is an extension  rather  than
an alteration.)