mailpost: References header is too long

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

> Hmm...  RFC 5536 defines:

>   references      =  "References:" SP [CFWS] msg-id *(CFWS msg-id)
>                      [CFWS] CRLF

> It is then more complicated than what you or I are suggesting!

> References: <a at b> <c at d> (<e at f> <g at h>)

> pop will return <g at h> which we do not want...
> Parsing headers is a plague :-/

Yeah, we did that for compatibility with mail, although I think the
unanimous opinion of the working group was that comments in the References
header were evil.  Hence:

   o  Comments in CFWS between message identifiers can cause
      interoperability problems, so comments SHOULD NOT be generated but
      MUST be accepted.

but of course we can't rely on that.  (When we tested, most news readers
just split on whitespace and treated the comments as additional message
IDs.)

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

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