🚀 go-pugleaf

[redirecting to comp.mail.headers  --apb]

In article <yLmTwB4w165w@valinor.mythical.com> in comp.mail.uucp,
stu@valinor.mythical.com (Stu Labovitz) writes:
> Now that we've covered what I believe are the relevant sections of the
> RFC, here's the question:  Does RFC #822 provide limits (either minimum or
> maximum) upon the number of SPACE characters that separate the "To:" from
> the mailbox on the destination line?  Must there be at least one SPACE,
> and is there any reasonable interpretation to prevent the existance of
> more than one SPACE?

There are no limits in RFC822.  RFC821 specifies a maximum line length
of 1000 chars (a sender may not transmit longer lines, but a receiver
is encouraged to accept longer lines).

RFC822 section 3.1.4 says that the free insertion of linear-white-space
is permitted between lexical tokens.  A cursory reading of this section
may suggest that it applies only to structured field bodies, but I
believe that the same rule applies to space between the field-name
and the colon, and to space between the colon and the first token in
the field-body.  I believe that this position is supported by clues
in section 1.1 ("The formal definition is divided into four levels ...
the second level describes basic lexical analysers that feed tokens to
higher-level parsers"), section 3.1.2 ("Field names, unstructured field
bodies and structured field bodies are eached scanned by their own,
independent \"lexical\" analyzers"), sections A.3.1 and A.3.2 (examples
in which there is no space between the field-name and the colon, and a
variable amount of space after the colon), and section A.3.3 (an example
in which there is space between the field-name and the colon).

In other words, if we consider the  definition of a field,

    field          =       field-name ":" [ field-body ] CRLF

we see that the field-name, the colon, and the first token of the
field-body are three separate tokens, which may be separated by any
amount of linear-white-space, including no space at all.

--apb
Alan Barrett, Dept. of Electronic Eng., Univ. of Natal, Durban, South Africa
RFC822: barrett@ee.und.ac.za                    Bang: m2xenix!undeed!barrett