INTERNET-DRAFT                               Charles H. Lindsey
Usenet Format Working Group                  University of Manchester
                                             July 2001

6.21.6.1. Application/news-transmission

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.

Diffs to previous draft

Files {draft-04} and {draft-05} are identical