ietf-nntp Question about AUTHINFO

[Russ Allbery]

Joao Prado Maia <jpm at papercut.org> writes:

> Right, but what should be the proper way, then ? And more than that,
> should we put this in the actual RFC/new draft so it gets properly
> documented ?

Jeff's draft does standardize AUTHINFO as well as address how to move to
SASL going forward, so that's where this can be resolved.

> Personally I don't see a problem in allowing a space on the USER part of
> the AUTHINFO process, since it is the last token of characters in
> it. But anyway, this was something an user brough up with me saying that
> a few of his clients couldn't connect because of the space in their
> usernames.

The only reason why this is potentially problematic is that a lot of
servers make use of the fact that one can generally tokenize all NNTP
commands by splitting on spaces, and allowing for spaces in the username
in AUTHINFO breaks this.

(It also breaks AUTHINFO SIMPLE, but I doubt anyone really cares there.)

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