Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)verizon(_dot_)net> writes:
Russ Allbery wrote:
The NNTP standards impose a maximum length of 250 characters for the
complete message ID when used in a Usenet article, so that may be a
reasonable upper guideline if there are no other more pressing
considerations, just for convenience of gatewaying.
IIRC, the NNTP limit is approx. 500 octets; the 250 limit for Usenet
articles is imposed by the 'dbz' implementation used in some Usenet
spooling software.
I'm sorry, you're right. I was insufficiently precise. The current,
completely out-dated and inadequate-for-implementation NNTP standard, RFC
977, limits the message ID to around 500 octets indirectly by limits on
the length of command arguments. (It doesn't address the point directly.)
The upcoming standards track replacement, which is very close to last call
and which is a much better basis for implementation, states:
o A message-id MUST begin with "<" and end with ">", and MUST NOT
contain the latter except at the end.
o A message-id MUST be between 3 and 250 octets in length.
o A message-id MUST NOT contain octets other than printable US-ASCII
characters.
but it is not yet a standard.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>