ietf-nntp <0> and message IDs

[Andrew Gierth]

>>>>> "Clive" == Clive D W Feather <clive at on-the-train.demon.co.uk> writes:

 Clive> In article concepts:

 Clive>    Each article MUST have a unique message-id; two articles offered by
 Clive>    an NNTP server MUST NOT have the same message-id. Note that RFC 1036
 Clive>    further requires that message-ids are globally unique for all time.

 Clive>    For the purposes of this specification, message-ids are opaque
 Clive>    strings that MUST meet the following requirements:
 Clive>    * A message-id MUST begin with "<" and end with ">", and MUST NOT
 Clive>      contain the latter except at the end.
 Clive>    * A message-id MUST be between 3 and 250 octets in length.
 Clive>    * A message-id MUST NOT contain octets other than printable US-ASCII
 Clive>      characters.

message-ids must not include the space character, either.

 Clive>    This specification does not describe how the message-id of an article
 Clive>    is determined. Many servers will extract the message-id from the
 Clive>    contents of a header with name "Message-ID", but this is not required
 Clive>    by this document. In particular, if the article does not contain such
 Clive>    a header, the server MUST synthesise a message-id (but need not
 Clive>    modify the article to add such a header).

I think there needs to be something pointing out that where the server
is conforming to an article format standard that has a definition of
message-ids which is compatible with the NNTP one, then the server
MUST use the ids defined by that specification rather than generate
its own.

-- 
Andrew.