From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 14:45:30 CDT
Usenet News Support <support@prodigy.net> writes:
> You did note that I mentioned that some existing software is broken WRT
> this? I dont regard "INN is broken and needs this" and a good
> justification for putting a restriction in a standard.
Are people proposing putting a restriction in, or are they proposing
taking a restriction out?
RFC 1036:
A standard USENET message consists of several header lines, followed
by a blank line, followed by the body of the message. Each header
line consist of a keyword, a colon, a blank, and some additional
information. This is a subset of the Internet standard, simplified
to allow simpler software to handle it. The "From" line may
optionally include a full name, in the format above, or use the
Internet angle bracket syntax. To keep the implementations simple,
other formats (for example, with part of the machine address after
the close parenthesis) are not allowed. The Internet convention of
continuation header lines (beginning with a blank or tab) is
allowed.
How do you want to read "some additional information"? It sure sounds
like it requires at least one additional character after the colon-space
to me, and it looks like a lot of other implementors have also read it
that way.
I plan on changing INN down the road (it's not an easy change) so that it
no longer requires this, in the name of maximum compatibility with mail
and to make mail to news gatewaying easier (since headers with nothing of
substance on the first header line do occur not infrequently in mail), but
I maintain that requiring non-whitespace on the first header line is a
perfectly reasonable interpretation of RFC 1036.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>