🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4580@daily-planet.concordia.ca> Gary Katch <gpkatch@alcor.concordia.ca> writes:
>                 /  "In-Reply-To"       ":"  *(phrase / msg-id)
...
>     In-Reply-To: <some.string@DBM.Group>, George's message
>
>Given that only phrases or message-id's can appear in the
>field-body, and that phrases are made of words and words of atoms,
>and an atom cannot be a special, then the comma following
>the address in the example is illegal, right?

I think the example is OK.  It's a msg-id followed by a phrase.  The "*"
prefix in the syntax means that there can be any number of phrases and
msg-ids, delimited by commas.

-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar

Gary Katch <gpkatch@alcor.concordia.ca> writes:
|
|   Sorry, I an reposting, last message got mangled.
|
|   I was looking at the syntax of In-Reply-To and References in
|   RFC822.  Here are the relevant parts:
|   --------
|        optional-field =
|        [...]
|                    /  "In-Reply-To"       ":"  *(phrase / msg-id)
|                    /  "References"        ":"  *(phrase / msg-id)
|        [...]
|        phrase      =  1*word                       ; Sequence of words
|        word        =  atom / quoted-string
|        quoted-string = <"> *(qtext/quoted-pair) <">; Regular qtext or
|        atom        =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>
|        specials    =  "(" / ")" / "<" / ">" / "@"  ; Must be in quoted-
|                    /  "," / ";" / ":" / "\" / <">  ;  string, to use
|                    /  "." / "[" / "]"              ;  within a word.
|
|        [Example]
|        A.3.3.  About as complex as you're going to get
|        [...]
|        In-Reply-To: <some.string@DBM.Group>, George's message
|   -----------------------------------------^
|
|   Given that only phrases or message-id's can appear in the
|   field-body, and that phrases are made of words and words of atoms,
|   and an atom cannot be a special, then the comma following
|   the address in the example is illegal, right?
|
|   Further, one could put neither addresses nor dates in the field-body
|   unless these strings are quoted  (there is "." and "@" in addresses,
|   and ":" and "," in dates).

Ignore this syntax specification, and treat it as if it said

	*(<any CHAR except "<" and ">" / msg-id)

which is to say that if there are paired delimiters ("<", ">") in there,
they probably delimit a message-id, and hopefully not some other
non-sense.

I have an automatic mail-threader, which attempts to intuit which
message something is a reply to based on several distorted forms of
"user friendliness" in the In-Reply-To field, and I have to add a rule
once a week or so.  Especially people on BITNET, who don't even know
about message ID's to begin with, and people who use ELM, which screws
up the date format, and _lose_ the time zone information.

References is usually uncontaminated by such user friendliness, though,
and the effective specification is a list of message-ids.

Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum             |  ISO  8879 SGML     |
                        |  ISO 10744 HyTime   |
+47-295-0313            |  ISO 10646 UCS      |      Memento, terrigena.
<erik@naggum.no>        |  ISO  9899 C        |      Memento, vita brevis.

barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
> I think the example is OK.  It's a msg-id followed by a phrase.  The "*"
> prefix in the syntax means that there can be any number of phrases and
> msg-ids, delimited by commas.

The "*" prefix means any number of items _not_ separated by commas; the
"#" prefix means that they are separated by commas.  The example --

     In-Reply-To: <some.string@DBM.Group>, George's message

in RFC 822 section A.3.3 is inconsistent with the syntax --

                 /  "In-Reply-To"       ":"  *(phrase / msg-id)

in section D.

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