Conformity

No rebels without a clue here, ma’am. We conform to all standards known to (wo)man. Except for those standards and/or conventions we disagree with, of course.

RFC 822

There are no known breaches of this standard or its successors (currently RFCs 2822 and 5322).

RFC 1036

There are no known breaches of this (now-obsolete) standard, either.

RFC 5536

We do have some breaches of this standard, the successor of RFC 1036.

X-Newsreader

User-Agent

These are considered to be “vanity headers”, while I consider them to be consumer information. After seeing so many badly formatted articles coming from tin and Netscape I know not to use either of those for posting articles. I would not have known that if it wasn’t for the X-Newsreader header.

USEFOR

USEFOR was an IETF working group that produced Internet RFCs 5536 and 5537. The Gnus towers will look into implementing the changes embodied by these standards.

MIME—RFC 2045–2049 etc

All the various MIME RFCs are supported.

Disposition Notifications—RFC 2298

Message Mode is able to request notifications from the receiver.

PGP—RFC 1991 and RFC 2440

RFC 1991 is the original PGP message specification, published as an informational RFC. RFC 2440 was the follow-up, now called Open PGP, and put on the Standards Track. Both document a non-MIME aware PGP format. Gnus supports both encoding (signing and encryption) and decoding (verification and decryption).

PGP/MIME—RFC 2015/3156

RFC 2015 (superseded by 3156 which references RFC 2440 instead of RFC 1991) describes the MIME-wrapping around the RFC 1991/2440 format. Gnus supports both encoding and decoding.

S/MIME—RFC 2633

RFC 2633 describes the S/MIME format.

IMAP—RFC 1730/2060, RFC 2195/4616, RFC 2086, RFC 2359, RFC 2595, RFC 1731

RFC 1730 is IMAP version 4, updated somewhat by RFC 2060 (IMAP 4 revision 1). RFC 2195 describes CRAM-MD5 authentication for IMAP. RFC 2086 describes access control lists (ACLs) for IMAP. RFC 2359 describes a IMAP protocol enhancement. RFC 2595 describes the proper TLS integration (STARTTLS) with IMAP. RFC 1731 describes the GSSAPI/Kerberos4 mechanisms for IMAP. RFC 4616 describes AUTH=PLAIN authentication for IMAP.

If you ever notice Gnus acting non-compliant with regards to the texts mentioned above, don’t hesitate to drop a note to Gnus Towers and let us know.