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From: alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Header woes, innocuous errors, and users
Keywords: space (the-final-frontier)
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.101432.28514@panix.uucp>
Date: 20 Jun 91 10:14:32 GMT
References: <15329@encore.Encore.COM>
Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY
Lines: 27

In article <15329@encore.Encore.COM> jjoy@encore.com (Jennifer Joy) writes:
>As a new admin I've spent the last few days reading over 400 news.admin
>and 200 news.software.b messages.  (ok, so I didn't read ALL of them..8)

You've got my sympathy. (Much more than Mathew... :-)

>I've got a tossed message that doesn't fit quite so neatly (or so it
>appears to me) into the pigeonholes of "bad news software so user suffers"
>and "bad newreader so user suffers."  In this case, by apparent user error
>the all-important <space> after the Followup-To: line was removed.  To
>the eye it looks the same, but because that space was removed, Pnews
>was prevented from removing the "blank" line.  This resulted in a message
>with a pristine (<cough>, well, by most RFC quibbles) header, except for 
>this silly Followup-To: line with no arguments.
>
>So this message was tossed on the floor by ukma (and other cnews mailers) 
>and tagged as "non-header header line." [etc.]

As far as I'm concerned, this is an implementation bug in Pnews that never
mattered until very recently. Some day I will get around to fixing it.
Hopefully by applying someone else's patches. :-)

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis@panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis