chip@t12tst.UUCP (Chip Rosenthal) (03/05/85)
There are several people out there who are using "From:" lines which violate the USENET standard. It appears to me that the number of violators has been increasing over the past Ponths. Unfortunately, these violations cause my mailer program to break. (Silly me...trying to base an algorithm around a standard.) Anyway, portions of the standard document (by Mark Horton) which describe this problem are quoted below: > 2.1.3 From > > The From line contains the electronic mailing address of the person who > sent the message, in the ARPA internet syntax. It may optionally also > contain the full name of the person, in parentheses, after the > electronic address..... > > Either the full name is omitted, or it appears in parentheses after the > electronic address of the person posting the article, or it appears > before an electronic address enclosed in angle brackets. Thus, the > three permissible forms are: > > From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP > From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) > From: Mark Horton <mark@cbosgd.UUCP> > > Full names may contain any printing ASCII characters from space through > tilde, with the exceptions that they may not contain parentheses ``('' > or ``)'', or angle brackets ``<'' or ``>''. I did a 'grep' on all the "From:" lines in net.unix. The ones which used angle brackets (names changed to protect...) and my comments are as follows: Correct "From" fields: From: John Q Public <jqp@bigvax> From: John Q Public <jqp%bigvax@gateway.ARPA> Illegal "From" fields: From: John Q Public (SC4-455) <jqp@bigvax.ARPA> parentheses in name From: jqp@bigvax.ARPA (John Q Public <jqp>) angle brackets in name Am I interpreting the standard correctly? If so, is there reason why the sites which violate the convention need to do so? On the other hand, does the standards document (and my mailer) need to be changed? Does anybody else but me care about this? (And what about Naomi?) -- Chip Rosenthal, Intel/Santa Clara, (408) 496-7651 {cbosgd,idi,intelca,icalqa,kremvax,qubix} ! {t4test,t12tst} ! {chip,news}
dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (03/05/85)
> Correct "From" fields: > From: John Q Public <jqp@bigvax> > From: John Q Public <jqp%bigvax@gateway.ARPA> > > Illegal "From" fields: > From: John Q Public (SC4-455) <jqp@bigvax.ARPA> parentheses in name > From: jqp@bigvax.ARPA (John Q Public <jqp>) angle brackets in name The latter 'From:' is correct under RFC822 syntax -- anything in parens is ignored by the mailer, including '<' and '>'. Let me check on that former line..... (rummage through documentation)... yes, the former is correct also -- comments (stuff in parens) may be located anywhere white- space is ok, which means they can go between the full-name and the route-addr. -- dave cohrs ...!{allegra,harvard,ihnp4,seismo}!uwvax!dave dave@wisc-rsch.arpa (bug? what bug? that's a feature!)
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (03/06/85)
The From lines listed by Chip are legal 822, but the restricted forms permitted by 850 (the netnews standard) forbid them. The idea behind these restrictions was to make reply commands easier to write. In practice, the two examples given don't look like they should bother a typical reply command. It would be reasonable to loosen up the Usenet standard to permit them (and perhaps to permit full 822 syntax.) I'm not offering to upgrade all the reply commands to do this, however, so the people who would have to should have the final say. Mark