usefor-usepro-01 September 2004

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7.9.1.  Duties of an Outgoing Gateway

   From the perspective of Netnews, an outgoing gateway is just a
   special type of reading agent. The exact nature of what the outgoing
   gateway will need to do to articles depends on the medium to which
   the articles are being gated. The operation of the outgoing gateway
   is only subject to additional constraints in the presence of one or
   more corresponding incoming gateways back from that medium to
   Netnews, since this opens the possibility of loops.

   In general, the following practices are recommended for all outgoing
   gateways, regardless of whether there is known to be a related
   incoming gateway, both as a precautionary measure and as a guideline
   to quality of implementation.

   1. The message identifier of the news article should be preserved if
      at all possible, preferably as or within the corresponding unique
      identifier of the other medium, but if not at least as a comment
      in the message. This helps greatly with preventing loops.

   2. The Date and Injection-Date of the news article should also be
      preserved if possible, for similar reasons.

   3. The message should be tagged in some way so as to prevent its
      reinjection into Netnews. This may be impossible to do without
      knowledge of potential incoming gateways, but it is better to try
      to provide some indication even if not successful; at the least, a
      human-readable indication that the article should not be gated
      back to Netnews can help locate a human problem.

   4. Netnews control messages should not be gated to another medium
      unless they would somehow be meaningful in that medium.

   5. Changes MAY be made to the Content-Transfer-Encoding of some or
      all parts of the body, and even to the charsets specified in
      encoded-words or in Content-Type-headers, but such changes SHOULD
      NOT be made unless absolutely necessary.
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News Article Format and Transmission May 2004
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News Article Format May 2002
News Article Format November 2001
News Article Format July 2001
News Article Format April 2001

--- ../usefor-usepro-00/Duties_of_an_Outgoing_Gateway.out          August 2004
+++ ../usefor-usepro-01/Duties_of_an_Outgoing_Gateway.out          September 2004
@@ -30,4 +30,9 @@
 
    4. Netnews control messages should not be gated to another medium
       unless they would somehow be meaningful in that medium.
+
+   5. Changes MAY be made to the Content-Transfer-Encoding of some or
+      all parts of the body, and even to the charsets specified in
+      encoded-words or in Content-Type-headers, but such changes SHOULD
+      NOT be made unless absolutely necessary.
 

Documents were processed to this format by Forrest J. Cavalier III