It shouldn't. See later.
>>From: "Dave Nagle" <dnagle@iinet.net.au>
>>To: <esmay@syndicomm.com (Dean Esmay)>
>>Subject: Re: Usenet Personals: Advice for Straights FAQ (1/3)
>>Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 15:49:27 +0800
>>Message-ID: <01bd4b2f$e2a8c7a0$02d808cb@bravo>
>>X-Priority: 3
>>X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
>>X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.71.1712.3
>>
>>Hi Dean,
>>
>>One of my interests is checking how well messages are propagating through
>>Usenet. [1]
>>
>>I have noticed that your FAQ does not appear to be arriving at some sites.
>>
>>It is possible that some sites are dropping the articles because of the use
>>of slashes in the Message-ID.
>>
>>To quote from RFC 1036:
>>
>> The angle brackets are considered part of the Message-ID. Thus, in
>> references to the Message-ID, such as the ihave/sendme and cancel
>> control messages, the angle brackets are included. White space
>> characters (e.g., blank and tab) are not allowed in a Message-ID.
>> Slashes ("/") are strongly discouraged. All characters between the
>> angle brackets must be printing ASCII characters.
The previous paragraph of RFC 1036 reads:
For example, the unique part could be an integer representing a
sequence number for messages submitted to the network, or a short
string derived from the date and time the message was created. For
example, a valid Message-ID for a message submitted from host ucbvax
in domain "Berkeley.EDU" would be "<4123@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>".
Programmers are urged not to make assumptions about the content of
Message-ID fields from other hosts, but to treat them as unknown
character strings. It is not safe, for example, to assume that a
Message-ID will be under 14 characters, that it is unique in the
first 14 characters, nor that is does not contain a "/".
In other words, if a message-id contains '/', and the software rejects
it, that software is broken.
However, RFC1036 does say 'if this spec differs from RFC822, then 822
should be considered correct' (paraphrasing). '/' does not appear in the
list of special characters. If you can understand the formatting:
msg-id = "<" addr-spec ">" ; Unique message id
addr-spec = local-part "@" domain ; global address
local-part = word *("." word) ; uninterpreted
; case-preserved
word = atom / quoted-string
atom = 1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
CTL = <any ASCII control ; ( 0- 37, 0.- 31.)
character and DEL> ; ( 177, 127.)
specials = "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@" ; Must be in quoted-
/ "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <"> ; string, to use
/ "." / "[" / "]" ; within a word.
So the disallowed chars are ()<>@,;:\"[], and RFC 1036 is wrong. '.' is a
special case, since it delimits a word.
Actually, the allocation of message-ids by the faq-server seems to make
sense, being as it is the archive name followed by (I assume) the time of
posting in seconds since 12am 1-1-1970.
However, if there *is* broken software around, changing the message-id may
be necessary.
Either underscores or dots are probably best.
-- Mike Dimmick Maintainer, Status Quo FAQ <music/status-quo/faq>