Russ Allbery wrote:
Ken Murchison <ken(_at_)oceana(_dot_)com> writes:
I find it interesting, if not disturbing, that some members of the
usenet community seem to think that mail messages and usenet articles
are not the same thing. AFAICT, from reading the relevant standards,
writing server code for SMTP/LMTP/IMAP/POP3/NNTP, and everyday use, mail
messages and news articles both conform to RFC 2822 (RFC 1036 states as
much). The only differences that I'm aware of are the following:
- usenet puts a greater restriction on the headers (although still being
RFC 2822 compliant)
Yes, although there are a variety of subtle things that fall into this
category that one has to be careful of. That's one of the difficulties
[...]
- National 8-bit character sets are in widespread use in Usenet message
headers, possibly more widespread than they are in (non-spam) mail
messages. Untagged 8-bit national character sets are widely used in
[...]
- MIME never got very much uptake on Usenet for attachments. The binary
newsgroups are almost universally uuencode or, these days, yEnc. Base64
[...]
OK. As I suspected there is nothing inherent in RFC [2]822 that makes
it unsuitable for news. Any incompatibilities are purely the result of
non-standardized stuff being implemented in news software.
So, the claims that mail and news are not the same was either misleading
and/or wishful thinking.
--
Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127
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