From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Sun Feb 27 2000 - 19:22:47 CST
On 27 Feb 2000, Ralph Babel wrote:
> Okay, so let's make the "From:" header optional.
> ...Rejecting or not forwarding an article
> because of a "missing" "From:" header is an artificial
> restriction, not an interoperability problem.
Unfortunately, no, I'm afraid it *is* an interoperability problem. Not
because it inherently has to be, but because the header has been mandatory
from the beginning, and so quite a bit of software expects it.
In the early days of C News, we checked only for the things we cared
about. No From header? We didn't care, so we didn't check. Eventually
we were talked into being somewhat more fussy, because there were other
news packages around which broke badly when presented with articles
lacking officially-mandatory headers.
The particular software packages which caused those problems are almost
certainly long gone, but they may well have descendants...
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net