Kind of OT: guess what I found!

[David Lee]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2009, Steve Freegard wrote:

> David Lee wrote:
>> I wonder whether if might be the "Message-ID" in Julian's emails?
>>
>> Here are some of the headers.  The 'Message-ID' is wrapped ("folded" in
>> RFC822 terminology), contains spaces, commas and a tab;  the tab is
>> probably the result of the folding.  RFC822 suggests that 'msg-id'
>> should be "<" addr-spec ">".  (As I read it, if its syntax wouldn't be a
>> valid email address, then it wouldn't be a valid 'msg-id' either.)
>>
>> Chasing down the syntax from there suggests that such a 'Message-ID'
>> would seem borderline at best; my suspicion is that it is beyond the
>> borders. Even if such a Message-ID is technically legal, the "be
>> conservative in what you send" principle might suggest considering a
>> revision.
>
> Hmmm - we recently made changes to the method used for modifying the
> Message-ID; however something appears to be mangling it.  The actual
> Message-ID is sent as:
>
> <EMEW,l1KAsk0c15677e2728c1a4bcf90ab66afb3922,MailScanner%ecs.soton.ac.uk,499FDD6E.9030908 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
>
> e.g. there are no spaces in the string (as you correct point out this
> would not be RFC valid if there were spaces within it).


Thanks for the ack, Steve.

But would even your intended (space-less) version be legal?  It contains 
commas.  Chasing down the RFC822 syntax:

    msg-id      =  "<" addr-spec ">"

    addr-spec   =  local-part "@" domain

    local-part  =  word *("." word)

    word        =  atom / quoted-string

    atom        =  1*<any CHAR except specials, SPACE and CTLs>

and 'specials' includes ",".

Won't the embedded "," still put you on the wrong side of the law?

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