From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 17 2002 - 11:49:23 CDT
In <200204170029.09053@sendmail.mutz.com> Marc Mutz <mutz@kde.org> writes:
>On Tuesday 16 April 2002 14:10, Charles Lindsey wrote:
><snip>
>> I don't think ';' has any special meaning (outside of comments and quoted
>> strings and the like) in any RFC 2822 header, except for those that we are
>> thinking of removing in 4a.
>(I think you meant 4b.)
Yes I did :-( .
>Yes, the only usage that comes to mind is that of delimiting a group: ;
>But that's what I meant: If parameters were allowed in rfc2822 address-list
>headers, then
>1. the newly created ambiguity of ';' together with
>2. the fact that this would change the syntax w.r.t. the corresponding rfc2822
> header
>will almost surely lead to a lot of buggy apps where both news and mail are
>processed. It also imposes additional work on news<->mail gateways for no
>apparent benefit.
Which is indeed the argument for going to 4b.
The additional argument for going to 4c (which adds From) is
a) to avoid confusion
b) so it is always safe to take such a header, replace its header-name
by To or Cc, and throw it at a mail system.
>> My inclination is to remain at 4c on the strength of the responses so far.
>> Unless someone can point me at serious damage that would result if we
>> don't go to 4d. Your examples above seem to suggest that mail readers are
>> likely to be quite tolerant in most of the headers in question.
>I'm not sure about message-id, but at least Mutt creates In-Reply-To headers
>that look like
>--beg--
>User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.16i
>In-Reply-To: <3B2A52CC.839852AA@mandrakesoft.com>; from
> mosfet@mandrakesoft.com on Fri, Jun 15, 2001 at 01:24:12PM -0500
>--end--
Now that is REAL ugly. Have they never heard of comments?
Do they do the same thing with References?
>So I assume that any mailer that masters the above header will master a
>message-id with parameters, too (at least with one). But that's pure
>guesswork.
Does any mail system really care about the message-id, except when
creating In-Reply-To or References?
My inclination is still to remain with 4c.
Note that all that is expected of news agents is that they should
tolerate/ignore everything after a naked ';'. It would do no harm for a
mail agent to do the same thing, which I think means there is no problem
for a mail+news agent that chooses to do so.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5