From: Matt Curtin (cmcurtin@interhack.net)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2002 - 06:51:42 CST
"Charles Lindsey" <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> Hmm. Henry seems to think otherwise, and so does Andrew Gierth (in
> an article on uk.net.news.management).
I was thinking that case sensitivity was the exception, rather than
the rule. I think I might have been wrong, though.
I did some poking around with Gnus and INN, and came up with a few
things.
With INN 1.7.2:
o Newsgroup names are (of course) case sensitive
o Headers with names posted in lower-case (e.g., "newsgroups",
"from", and "organization" in my test) were accepted.
o Articles posted with lower-case headers, when read, were presented
with mixed-case, i.e., "Newsgroups", "From", and "Organization".
The third item came as a surprise to me, but now that I'm thinking
about it more carefully, I have the feeling that it should not have
been a surprise.
I realize that we're talking about a few different things here (header
names vs. contents and server vs. client behavior).
I just checked the sources for Gnus 5.8.8, and its behavior is:
o Handles Followup-to: poster case-insensitively
o When creating an article, it doesn't understand "Poster" or
"pOsTeR" (it prompts about an unknown group), but it does
understand "poster". You can put Followup-to: PoStEr and answer
yes to the prompt, and it will try to post the article.
INN 1.7.2 requires all lowercase "poster" when posting an article,
otherwise, it responds with a 441, No valid newsgroups in "POSTER" (or
whatever other perverse casing you try).
> It is a MUST as the draft as currently written for that reason, but
> the suggestion is that should be changed (there are other places
> where we have made things case sensitive by writing the required
> string explicitly in hex, for example "Re: ").
It looks like the draft is out of sync with what's happening in my
environment. I'd say that if what I'm seeing is common, then Henry is
right, and it MUST be case-sensitive, i.e., "Followup-to: poster".
-- Matt Curtin, CISSP, IAM, INTP. Keywords: Lisp, Unix, Internet, INFOSEC. Founder, Interhack Corporation +1 614 545 HACK http://web.interhack.com/ Author of /Developing Trust: Online Privacy and Security/ (Apress, 2001)