Re: draft-resnick-2822upd-02 and Netnews

In <[email protected]> SM <[email protected]> writes:

>Hi Charles,
>At 07:16 28-08-2007, Charles Lindsey wrote:
>>An RFC2822 parser that will not accept SP after the ':' will already be
>>non-compliant, and will still be non-compliant even if absence of that SP
>>is relegated to the obs-syntax. Moreover, since 99.999% of emails
>>currently sent already include that SP, such a parser would be totally
>>useless in the current email environment - so I think we can safely assume
>>that no such parser exists.

>We don't know the current email environment.  Each of us sees a 
>subset of it.  Put together, we get a better picture of it but we 
>still don't have the whole picture.  I, for one, would not assume 
>that no such parser exists.

But if it _does_ exist, then it will be incapable of reading 99.999% of
emails as currently sent, so I doubt anybody would be using it. And for
sure it would already be non-compliant, so I do not think we need be
concerned with it.

>>An existing RFC2822 agent that currently _generates_ headers without that
>>SP (I am not aware of any) would then become non-compliant, but the
>>messages it generated would still be accepted by all current and future
>>2822-bis-compliant agents.

>I thought that the aim of this update to RFC 2822 was not to make 
>existing implementations non-compliant.

No harm arises from making an existing implementation technically
non-compliant so long as all existing and future implementations are
REQUIRED to interoperate with it (as would be the case here).

The only thing such an implementation would not do is to interoperate with
Netnews.

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