From: Dirk Nimmich (nimmich@muenster.de)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 15:35:08 CDT
Bruce Lilly wrote:
> This is one of those cases where it is necessary to consider where the rule
> (if it is retained) is enforced. Suppose a UA generates:
>
> Organization:
> =?ISO-8859-1*de?q?Citykom_M=FCnster_Gesellschaft_mit_beschr=AEnkter_?=
> =?ISO-8859-1*de?q?Haftung?=
>
> That's a perfectly valid RFC 2822 / MIME field.
But no valid Usenet header; not only because there is no content on
the first line but also because there is no SP after the colon => no
guarantee for distribution or proper handling in clients. I'd
consider that UA broken if used for Usenet postings. Also, it would
have been easy to encode
Organization: =?ISO-8859-1*DE?Q?Citykom_M=FCnster_Gesellschaft_mit_beschr?=
=?ISO-8859-1*DE?Q?=AEnkter_Haftung?=
or even better
Organization: Citykom =?ISO-8859-1*DE?Q?M=FCnster?= Gesellschaft mit
=?ISO-8859-1*DE?Q?beschr=AEnkter?= Haftung
or something similar.
> Which software is supposed to enforce the no-WSP-only-on-first-line rule?
The software that generates that particular header in the first
place. The injecting agent as a second instance.
> What should it do --
Not generate header content that might get rejected. (Be conservative
in what you send.) Reject or accept it if it is the injecting agent,
but don't modify it.
> combining the first and second lines will cause the valid message
> to become invalid (violating MIME)?
There are so many common MIME violations, in particular not honoring
size limits (both encoded-word and line lengths), that any receiving
agent must be able to cope with it anyway. BTDT.
On the other hand I don't know of any agent (be it mail or news)
that generates WSP only on the first line as header content.