henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (08/06/89)
In article <1989Aug4.164427.3810@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >Geoff is the RFCologist in this, and he says the question actually does not >seem to have a well-defined answer... Geoff has consulted the Holy Writs again, at length, and says that to his astonishment, for once they actually appear to agree: white space is not legal in Message-IDs. There remains the question of what to *do* about such a Message-ID, given our preference for tolerance. -- 1961-1969: 8 years of Apollo. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1969-1989: 20 years of nothing.| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) (08/07/89)
In article <1989Aug6.040523.11690@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > In article <1989Aug4.164427.3810@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > >Geoff is the RFCologist in this, and he says the question actually does not > >seem to have a well-defined answer... > > Geoff has consulted the Holy Writs again, at length, and says that to his > astonishment, for once they actually appear to agree: white space is not > legal in Message-IDs. > > There remains the question of what to *do* about such a Message-ID, given > our preference for tolerance. This came up about a year ago when there were a flurry of whitespace problems including, if I remember, a really ugly one with a trailing tab character, that caused messly looping problems. I patched inews here to check for nasty message-ids, print a message about obscene characters and toss the article. It is *not* safe to improve the message-id and pass it on. It may be safe to accept and use the non-legal message-id, but I'm not sure that passing known tainted data to your neighbor is such a good idea. Such message-id's are not frequent, they are ususally the result of atricles getting munged or one site that screwed up a news configuration or gateway function, and it's best to make such sites fix the problem. -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)