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From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Recently observed nonconforming Message-IDs (discussion)
Message-ID: <1991Jun13.155005.5218@twinsun.com>
Date: 13 Jun 91 15:50:05 GMT
References: <1991Jun12.071111.29652@twinsun.com> <1991Jun13.042834.20543@zoo.toronto.edu>
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henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>Uh, do bear in mind that RFC1036 message IDs are much more leniently
>defined than 822/1123 message IDs.  While it may be unwise to use news
>message IDs that are not legal mail message IDs, it is not disastrous.

Practically speaking, this is correct: after all, I wouldn't have
observed the nonconforming Message-IDs if they hadn't propagated
through part of Usenet successfully!  But RFC-1036 says ``all USENET
news messages must be formatted as valid Internet mail messages,
according to the Internet standard RFC-822.''  RFC-1036 places its own
constraints on message format, but it doesn't remove any RFC-822
constraints.

Of the 388 nonconforming Message-IDs that I found, only 10% had C News
format.  This is a good record, since 40% of the conforming IDs had C
News format.  The two problems were nonconforming domain names,
probably due to a C News installer answering conf/build's questions
incorrectly, and multiple `@'s, probably due to NNTP mishaps.