ietf-nntp E-mail address field of LIST ACTIVE.TIMES

[Russ Allbery]

Section 9.4.2 says:

    The active.times file is maintained by some news transport systems to
    contain information about who created a particular newsgroup and
    when. The format of this file includes three fields.  The first field
    is the name of the newsgroup.  The second is the time when this group
    was created on this news server measured in seconds since the start of
    January 1, 1970.  The third is the email address of the entity that
    created the newsgroup.

This doesn't say anything about the format of the e-mail addresses.  The
examples show them in angle brackets:

    Example of LIST ACTIVE.TIMES returning a list of newsgroups 
              [S] 200 NNTP Service Ready 
              [C] LIST ACTIVE.TIMES 
              [S] 215 information follows 
              [S] misc.test 930445408 <creatme at isc.org>  
              [S] alt.rfc-writers.recovery 930562309 <m at nowhere.to>
              [S] tx.natives.recovery 930678923 <sob at academ.com>  
              [S]  . 

A current INN server returns the e-mail address without the angle
brackets, and checking the INN 1.0 source code (which require some tracing
through the logic), it appears that this has always been the way that file
was stored by INN.

Does this matter enough to take a stance one way or the other in the
standard, and if so, which choice should we pick?  It may be that all we
should do is change the example to match INN's behavior to avoid
confusion, unless other servers really do include the angle brackets.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>