Why the special character restriction?

[Russ Allbery]

Anne Wilson <anne at unidata.ucar.edu> writes:

> But, I still get asked a question for which I have no good answer.  Why
> the continued restriction on special characters in the message body? Why
> can't the message body just be a black box?

> It's not a big deal for us to do a simple encoding because we visit
> every byte of a data product anyway in order to compute a
> signature. But, if we didn't want to compute a signature the cost of
> encoding would be much harder to swallow.

There are several problems:

The NNTP standard requires that all messages end in CRLF.  There's no way
around this without inventing a new set of commands that allow arbitrary
binary data.

INN can't cope with nul characters in the message body because it uses too
many of the standard C string functions.  This should be fixable; it will
just require a fair bit of work to flush out all of the problems with all
of the different utilities.  I'd love to do this work but have very, very
limited time to work on INN right now, unfortunately.  (As does nearly
everyone else working on INN.)

There are some requirements that INN enforces because they're requirements
of the underlying article format standards, although it already waives
some of them, like unpaired CR or LF.  This should really be a
configurable option, but again will require some implementation work.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.