ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question

[Kenneth Herron]

>I was sure that Dave Lawrence pointed me to a draft that specified 
>newsgroup name lengths etc.  Of course, it might have been an expired 
>document or not on any sort of standards track.

Henry Spencer's son-of-1036 document specifies a character set for
group names, as well as the 14-char-per-component limit.  He doesn't
prescribe a maximum total length.  He also provides for MIME-encoding
funny characters in any name component after the first (using the =20
syntax, I presume).

I agree that this is really the responsibility of an RFC 1036-like
document.  The NNTP RFC should say as little on the subject as
possible, perhaps simply that they can't contain white space.  Length
is limited by the necessity of fitting them inside the 512-char
command length limit.