🚀 go-pugleaf

jim@american.edu (Jim McIntosh) writes:
: 
: Right.  The  circumstances  were  that the  sender's  mail  software  was
: generating  an illegal  (by Usenet  standards) Message-ID.  The ListServ,
: which could  care less about  Message-ID's, replicated the  Message-ID on
: the post sent to the NetNews  server because NetNews has its subscription
: set to FULLHDR. (NetNews depends on  Message-ID being present in the post
: to discard  the post  when it comes  back from the  list, and  to control
: duplicates in a situation where there may be two sites acting as a global
: gateway.)
: 

Chances are the Message-ID is also illegal by RFC822 e-mail standards, but
I don't know of any mail software that currently checks the syntax.  When
vendors (like NeXT) ship broken mailers and configurations, and then people
that don't understand what they're doing try to customize their own or 
their system's message-ids, it's not surprising )-:

As time goes on, trying to get these "broken" messages into Usenet is only
going to get worse.  Newer versions of C-News (12/91 or later, which I run)
are picky about RFC-conformant Message-ID syntax, and InterNetNews (INN),
the new real-time transport system being used on many of the backbone
sites, is even more rigorous in its message-id testing and rejection.
Incidentally, this topic has come up several times in news.admin[.misc],
too... bad posting software, mangling e-mail gateways, and the like are
all regular offenders.

Another one that's bitten me (I *think* PSU NetNews handles this) is if
the post is missing a Subject: header.  I had to kludge my e-mail gateway
software here to deal with that.

Jim posed the real question: what do we do with them ?  In my case, I
don't know that I ever missed an important post for this reason... but
that's just it, I don't know that.
--
Doug Sewell, Tech Support, Computer Center, Youngstown State University
doug@cc.ysu.edu	   doug@ysub.bitnet	<internet>!cc.ysu.edu!doug
"Recession: your friend loses his job.  Depression: you lose your job.
Recovery: Bush loses his job" - Bill Davidsen