Xref: utzoo news.software.b:2732 comp.sources.d:3942 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!cbmvax!grr From: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.sources.d Subject: Re: update on white space in Message-IDs Message-ID: <7556@cbmvax.UUCP> Date: 6 Aug 89 20:37:33 GMT References: <1989Jul31.053214.3554@vicom.com> <1989Aug4.000449.14891@utzoo.uucp> <1989Aug4.164427.3810@utzoo.uucp> <1989Aug6.040523.11690@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA Lines: 31 In article <1989Aug6.040523.11690@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > In article <1989Aug4.164427.3810@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > >Geoff is the RFCologist in this, and he says the question actually does not > >seem to have a well-defined answer... > > Geoff has consulted the Holy Writs again, at length, and says that to his > astonishment, for once they actually appear to agree: white space is not > legal in Message-IDs. > > There remains the question of what to *do* about such a Message-ID, given > our preference for tolerance. This came up about a year ago when there were a flurry of whitespace problems including, if I remember, a really ugly one with a trailing tab character, that caused messly looping problems. I patched inews here to check for nasty message-ids, print a message about obscene characters and toss the article. It is *not* safe to improve the message-id and pass it on. It may be safe to accept and use the non-legal message-id, but I'm not sure that passing known tainted data to your neighbor is such a good idea. Such message-id's are not frequent, they are ususally the result of atricles getting munged or one site that screwed up a news configuration or gateway function, and it's best to make such sites fix the problem. -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)