Re: Intent to revive "expires" header fromdraft-ietf-mailext-new-fields-15

On Tue, 2008-07-29, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Bill McQuillan <[email protected]> writes:

>> In netnews the tradition is that the originator of a message "owns" it.
>> Thus the author is empowered to cancel a message that he or she has
>> posted and to suggest the lifetime of that message by using the
>> "Expires:" field.

> I don't believe this is a correct characterization of how netnews works or
> how the netnews protocol documents present control over message stores.
> It is quite well-established in the Usenet world that the operator of a
> news server has complete control over that message store, including
> keeping messages for an arbitrary length of time, ignoring Expires,
> rejecting all cancel messages, and so forth.  The original poster has no
> control over the message within the protocol once it has left their
> posting client; they can only provide advisory information and requests.

Actually, as I understand it an operator only has control of his own local
store (and any downstream stores which soley depend on his feed.) The
message I was refering to is a higher level entity that may be cached in
many thousand stores that no one operator has control over.

Obviously, there are overrides possible in the real world, but the one
person that usenet seems to treat as legitimate in sending a cancel message
is the author. I do not claim that this is an integral part of the
architecture, but it seems to me that it is a generally accepted feature of
usenet but not of email.

-- 
Bill McQuillan <[email protected]>