Xref: utzoo news.software.nntp:1418 news.software.b:8337
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: NNTPD hates Message-IDs with TWO '@'s in them.
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.155410.12231@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 1991 15:54:10 GMT
References: <1991Jun17.191642.27639@zoo.toronto.edu> <6038@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1991Jun18.191531.10098@zoo.toronto.edu> <5128@lib.tmc.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <5128@lib.tmc.edu> sob@lib.tmc.edu (Stan Barber) writes:
>>This does mean that we occasionally have cause to revise our opinion of
>>some feature, when it turns out that its lack causes problems.
>Excellent. I am happy to see that you are willing to reexamine your opinions.
>I frequently came away with a belief that you were unwilling to consider
>the possibility of being incorrect on some issue.

We do have strongly held opinions on a lot of things, but we do change them
when the evidence clearly points the other way.  We still don't like having
to parse dates, for example, but it appears to be necessary -- our original
belief that longer histories would suffice to deal with recirculation of
stale news was incorrect.  (It's still the technically-right solution,
actually, but the length of history needed is impractical.)

>>I would like to see a concise description of *exactly* what restrictions
>>should be enforced, since full 822 parsing is ridiculously complex and
>>expensive and appears to be overkill...
>Perhaps this should be the subject of a revision of RFC1036 you proposed.
>At the very least, only one @ should be allowed. How would you like to
>proceed?

By taking a long vacation. :-)  Getting the RFC revised is likely to be a
fairly lengthy process, although it is becoming clear that we need to tackle
it soon.  I'm going to pursue that when I get back from an imminent short
vacation.

Meanwhile, I *think* limitation to a single @ is the only urgent item,
and this is being looked into.
-- 
"We're thinking about upgrading from    | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5."              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry