Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!apollo!rees From: rees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Message-ID bugs in nntp and netnews? Message-ID: <3b7b0905.b8ab@apollo.uucp> Date: 15 Apr 88 18:16:00 GMT References: <8804090600.AA14895@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, Mass. Lines: 35 I happened to notice the message from der Mouse arguing that Message-IDs aren't supposed to be case-sensitive. We both agreed that according to RFC822, they're case-sensitive (well, the part to the left of the @-sign is case-sensitive). Here are parts of an interchange we had on the subject. RFC822 is not necessarily the correct standard. There is another RFC that covers news articles, although it generally defers to RFC822 when appropriate. The news standard doesn't say anything about case folding, but it does say that the part after the '@' is a site name, the implication being that this part should be case-folded. Unfortunately the current 2.11 software folds the entire message-id, not just the site name part. So if you want to make sure your articles are seen, you had best make sure they are unique even if the entire message-id is folded. It would probably be a good idea if future releases of the news software would only fold the sitename part of the message-id. But for the foreseeable future, we're stuck with the current scheme. If anyone wants to tackle it, the fix goes around the call to lcase() in history(), ifuncs.c. You would also need to fix expire, I think. Historical note: Back when 2.10 first came out, and article-id was turned into message-id, the news software used to do some gratuitous domain-mucking to guess that the domain of a pre-2.10 site was probably "UUCP." Those of us who weren't in the "UUCP" domain (I was the admin at uw-beaver.arpa at the time) got screwed by this, because all our articles would show up as duplicates, one with a .UUCP domain and the other with a .arpa domain. To make a long story short, part of the fix was to case-fold the site (and domain) part of the message-id. I wondered at the time if we would get in trouble for also folding the non-sitename part. I guess maybe we have. P.S.: My message-id consists of a time stamp plus a unique node id assigned at the factory to my Apollo node. If you are on the Apollo corporate net you can find out what node I'm using from the message-id.