Newsgroups: news.admin
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: More mashed Message-IDs
Message-ID: <1989Sep17.014958.26095@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Sep16.160104.14146@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 89 01:49:58 GMT

In article <1989Sep16.160104.14146@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>Message-ID: <8909130935268E6.AJTQ@Mars.UCC.UMass.EDU> (UMass-Mailer 4.04)
>Message-ID: <8909130935268E6.AJTQ@Mars.UCC.UMass.EDU>?(UMass-Mailer?4.04)
>Message-ID: <8909130935268E6.AJTQ@Mars.UCC.UMass.EDU>(UMass-Mailer4.04)
>Message-ID: <8909130935268E6.AJTQ@Mars.UCC.UMass.EDU>-(UMass-Mailer-4.04)
>Message-ID: <8909130935268E6.AJTQ@Mars.UCC.UMass.EDU>.(UMass-Mailer.4.04)
>
>Side note: as far as the "real" message id (the part between the angle
>brackets) is concerned these are the same article. Should news be patched
>to use just the text between the brackets as the message id? As far as
>I know, neither B 2.11 or C does this, but it looks ok from my reading
>of RFC1036...

If you read RFC1036 very carefully, the simplified RFC822 syntax it defines
does **NOT** permit parenthesized comments.  (The human-readable name in
the From: line is an explicit exception.)  A message-ID line cannot include
anything but the message-ID, which must be delimited by `<' and '>'.  The
above Message-ID lines are all illegal.  The proper response is an error
message and a refusal to forward the article.

An up-to-date C News will discard the first one for having white space in
the message-ID, but the current relaynews code doesn't enforce the <> rule.
Probably it should -- mkhistory does.
-- 
"Where is D.D. Harriman now,   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
when we really *need* him?"    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu