INTERNET-DRAFT Charles H. Lindsey Usenet Format Working Group University of Manchester April 2001
6.21.6.1. Application/news-transmission The Content-Type "application/news-transmission" is intended for the encapsulation of complete news articles where the intention is that the recipient should then inject them into Netnews. This Application type SHOULD be used when mailing articles to moderators and to mail- to-news gateways (see 8.2.2). NOTE: The benefit of such encapsulation is that it removes possible conflict between news and email headers and it provides a convenient way of "tunnelling" a news article through a transport medium that does not support 8bit characters. The MIME content type definition of "application/news-transmission" is: MIME type name: application MIME subtype name: news-transmission Required parameters: none Optional parameters: usage=moderate usage=inject usage=relay Encoding considerations: A transfer-encoding (such as Quoted- Printable or Base64) different from that of the article transmitted MAY be supplied (perhaps en route) to ensure correct transmission over some 7bit transport medium. Security considerations: A news article may be a "control message", which could have effects on the recipient host's system beyond just storage of the article. However, such control messages also occur in normal news flow, so most hosts will already be suitably defended against undesired effects. Published specification: [USEFOR] Body part: A complete article or proto-article, ready for injection into Netnews, or a batch of such articles. NOTE: It is likely that the recipient of an "application/news- transmission" will be a specialised gateway (e.g. a moderator's submission address) able to accept articles with only one of the three usage parameters "moderate", "inject" and "relay", hence the reason why they are optional, being redundant in most situations. Nevertheless, they MAY be used to signify the originator's intention with regard to the transmission, so removing any possible doubt. When the parameter "relay" is used, or implied, the body part MAY be a batch of articles to be transmitted together, in which case the following syntax MUST be used. batch = 1*( batch-header article ) batch-header = "#!" SP "rnews" SP article-size CRLF article-size = 1*digit where the "rnews" is case-sensitive. Thus a batch is a sequence of articles, each prefixed by a header line that includes its size. The article-size is a decimal count of the octets in the article, counting each CRLF as one octet regardless of how it is actually represented. NOTE: Despite the similarity of this format to an executable UNIX script, it is EXTREMELY unwise to feed such a batch into a command interpreter in anticipation of it running a command named "rnews"; the security implications of so doing would be disastrous.[Previous Up Next]
See also previous draft (03): 6.17.6.1. Application/news-transmission
See also previous draft (02): 6.15.5.2 Application/news-message
See also previous draft (02): 6.15.5.1 Application/news-transmission
See also previous draft (son-of-1036): 8_4__Partial_Batches
See also previous draft (son-of-1036): 8_3__News_Within_Mail
See also previous draft (son-of-1036): 8_2__Encoded_Batches
See also previous draft (son-of-1036): 8_1__Batches
See also previous draft (rfc-1036):