On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Andrew Gierth wrote:
Mail systems do not appear to make any actual use of the message-id
header other than for logging (and internally in some odd systems).
Huh? Message-ID, In-Reply-To, and References are heavily used in mail for
threading. IMAP even has a THREAD facility that stipulates how to use
these.
None of SMTP, POP3 or IMAP ever use message-ids as protocol
parameters. News, on the other hand, uses message-ids as protocol
parameters _all the time_, both for readers accessing messages and for
server-to-server transfer.
Let's try to translate your comment into something useful. Is it your
contention that:
Some set of commands in NNTP use message-id as an argument.
The syntax for that command precludes the use of space in
that argument, and/or NNTP lacks the type of quoting mechanism
found in IMAP and SMTP.
If so, please provide the details. If confirmed, that is useful and can
be stated as a requirement. It isn't clear to me that it's a requirement
for header syntax; rather, it's a transport imposed requirement. The
effect is the same (you can't use message-ids with spaces in news), but
it's stated in the right place.
Note that there is quite a bit in RFC 2822 that is not permissible in mail
due to transport imposed requirements. There was even more in RFC 822.
That doesn't mean that mail can not use RFC 2822.
(and, FWIW, I checked about a hundred thousand message-ids taken from
mail messages here, and only one of those had whitespace in and that
was a Chinese spam which had four spaces in place of the domain-part,
almost certainly due to misconfigured or broken spamming software.
That isn't an example of a syntactically valid RFC 2822 message-id.
Mark> And the IETF/IESG is supposed to respect this?
yes
If NNTP has a limitation such as suggested above, then that would add a
transport imposed requirement to a document that otherwise uses RFC 2822
and MIME as normative. That is something that can be respected.
That is different from duplicating all of RFC 2822 and MIME just to insert
transport imposed requirements. Doing so, which the Usefor document has
done, is ludicrous. What's worse, it has the highly undesirable effect of
cloaking the transport-imposed requirements.
A small document, such as Kohn's draft, which has a section of "NNTP
transport requirements" would show these requirements in clear contrast.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.