Articles, Bulletins and Messages

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Article

The term Article refers to the header and body of a message transported by nntp and resident within the newsgroup database.

Bulletin

The term Bulletin refers to the header and body of a message transported by the BBS network and resident within the BBS message database. This term includes only bulletins. NTS and Personal messages are treated elsewhere.

Message

The term Message refers to the header and body of a message transported by smtp and resident within the email database.

Article, Bulletin and Message identifiers.

In the internet protocols, each message or article has one ID. The "same" message or article (e.g. KEPS) entered by two people at two different systems will be "dups" in that each can only carry the ID generated by the mail or news client used to create it. There is no concept of a BID (identifier of message or article CONTENT) in the internet protocols.

Where do Articles, Bulletins and Messages come from?

1. Articles (via nntp to e.g. alt.ww.lllids).
   The article has one ID.
   The ID is unique to all instances of the article.
   There is no concept of a BID (identification of content).

2. Bulletins (via ax.25 or other transport to e.g. lllids@ww).
   A bulletin has two IDs: MID and BID.
   The MID is unique to all instances of the specific bulletin.
   The BID is "globally unique" to all bulletins with the same content.
   The BID is unique to all instances of the bulletin, the MID is not.

3. Messages (via smtp to e.g. !alt!ww!lllids).
   The message has one ID.
   The ID is unique to all instances of the message.
   There is no concept of a BID (identification of content).

From the above we see that moving between smtp and nntp (between Messages and Articles) is fairly simple, since the type and use of the IDs is similar. Mapping messages and articles to and from Bulletins is more complex since there is no clear way to handle the BID (Bulletin IDentifier).

In early work on various NOS systems, an extended header was used to carry the BID across smtp connections. An example is the header "X-BID: ". Others systems used variations or extensions to the standard RFC-822 "Message-ID: " header, for example adding a trailing "@call.bbs" to the usual message or article ID. For NOS systems to interoperate they must all recognize each other's BID encoding schemes. The scheme adopted for smtp will also work for nntp, since both protocols are based on the same standards and have the same capabilities (see RFC-822 and RFC-977 e.g.)

SNOS recognizes the "extended Message-ID: header scheme" but uses the "X-BID: " header as it's standard way of transporting a BID and attaching it to an article.