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From: jerry@olivey.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Summary: B news has been droping articles with bad headers all along.
Message-ID: <50613@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: 5 Apr 91 06:39:55 GMT
References: <1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr04.221130.19697@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <1991Apr4.231602.17306@world.std.com>
Sender: news@olivea.atc.olivetti.com
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, CA
Lines: 20

In article <1991Apr4.231602.17306@world.std.com> geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>It shouldn't cause problems, but it does.  B News (in conformance with
>RFC 1036) insists upon the space after the colon; if it's absent, B News
>will complain "Inbound news is garbled!" (as I recall) and drop the
>article (and the batch? it's been a long time).  So articles lacking
>spaces after colons have been getting dropped by B News sites anyway.

Darn if he isn't right.  I just verified this by hand editing an article
to get rid of a few of the spaces and passing it to rnews (B 2.11.19).
Sure enough it gave the message "inews: Inbound news is garbled".  The
article was no where to be found.  No mail to the poster.  Zip!

If Henry and Geoff had made it clear that they were not only making C
news follow the spec. but were making it more backward compatible then
they would have gotten a lot less flak.

--
"Batching is good.  Batching is great.  All hail batching!
It is impossible to process individual articles as efficently as
batches, and even if you could it would be an evil thing to do."