leonard@arizona.edu (07/11/90)
A discussion has lately arisen in news.software.anu-news regarding
whether an NNTP client must provide a message ID header line to the
NNTP server. (I am cross-posting to news.software.nntp hoping to
elicit some well-aged wisdom from that group.)
It appears that many popular U*x-based NNTP news readers, such as
xrn, rrn and nn, do not provide such a header line. In response,
ANU rejects the post with
NNTP Serious Error: 441 Invalid headers - Message_ID: header missing..
Yet U*x NNTP V1.5.? quite happily accepts postings from such machines.
It seems clear, in a reading of RFC's 977 and 850, that the Message-ID
header line is REQUIRED. Why, then, do the U*x news readers typically
omit it? Should this requirement be relaxed, and should the NNTP
servers create a Message-ID when they receive a posting that lacks one?
Aaron Leonard <leonard@arizona.edu>
Appendix:
The transaction between an xrn client attempting to post onto an ANU
server, looks like this:
xrn: POST
ANU: 340 Send an article to be posted
xrn: Path: thisnode!me
xrn: Newsgroups: ...
Distribution: ...
Followup-To: ...
From: ...
Reply-To: ...
Organization: ...
Subject: ...
Keywords: ...
<cr><lf><cr><lf>
<body of posting>
ANU: 441 Invalid headers - Message_ID: header missing