ietf-822
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Re: optional space after header field colon

2004-09-13 17:46:18

Martin Trautmann writes:
is there any real rule whether to put an empty space between a field
name's colon and the field body?

Including spaces is a really bad idea: Cyrus imapd and AMS and metamail
and mpack have been reported to choke on spaces. 822 allowed spaces but
2822 doesn't. http://cr.yp.to/immhf/field.html covers all this.

It's common behavior to include one here,

Common where? I've heard rumors, so I recommend that readers accept
spaces, but I've never seen confirmation of the rumors.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago