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Re: Compatibility wit Netnews (was I-D ACTION:draft-resnick-2822upd-01.txt)

2007-04-30 13:14:58

On 4/30/07 at 9:14 PM +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

Pete Resnick writes:
I'd rather stick with the liberal syntax for now, and maybe add a note that says, "You SHOULD be conservative in what you generate, as NO-WS-CTLs, quoted-pairs, and specials are known to cause heartburn in some environments (cf. USEFOR)."

+1. Proposed text: «It is RECOMMENDED to use only A-Z, a-z, 0-9, ".", "." and "/" on the left-hand side, and to make the left-hand side at most 64 characters long. Unusual but permitted syntax such as (for example) quoted-pairs are known to cause problems in some contexts.»

So, now I'm beginning to get uneasy about using SHOULD/RECOMMENDED in here. If we want normative language like the above, we should really just remove no-fold-quote (since quoted-string is already allowed in the obs- syntax).

How about simply:

        Note: There are contexts outside of Internet mail (specifically
        Netnews [ref]) where message identifiers containing NO-WS-CTLs,
        quoted-pairs, and specials on the left-hand side of the "@"
        cause trouble for some implementations. Since messages
        sometimes do traverse contexts, avoiding these on the left-hand
        side of the "@" may be safest for implementations.

pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated