ietf-nntp Message IDs

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yladfumrgt.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>7. Article posting and retrieval

>  I don't think we should refer to RFC 2822 here, or in fact require a
>  particular message ID syntax.  NNTP can at least theoretically be used
>  for storing any messages with a vaguely mail-like syntax.  I would
>  therefore replace the end of this section with:

>    Message-ids are, in this specification, opaque identifiers inside
>    angle brackets that uniquely identify messages.  They must satisfy the
>    following restrictions:

Yes, this approach is fine. Essentially, you either define message-ids
very broadly, and say "octets much match" and "other standards may provide
more restrictions/conventions", or else you describe their syntax in
excruciating detail. Problem was the present draft was somewhere in the
middle.

...

>    Message-ids are compared octet by octet by the NNTP protocol, and a
>    particular octet sequence is considered to be a different message-id
>    than any other, differing octet sequence regardless of the semantics
>    of that sequence of octets in any other protocol.  As an example, the
>    message-ids:

>      <"abcd"@example.com>
>      <"ab\cd"@example.com>

But it is essential to say that, and the examples are there to explain why
it is important.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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