Re: 'Weird' newsgroup...

[krasel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Cornelius Krasel)]

"Evert Meulie esq." <evert@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Cornelius Krasel wrote:
> > "Evert Meulie esq." <evert@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > A message with the following headers doesn't get posted. It seems to have
> > > to do with the newsgroup name. How do I solve this?
> > > 
> > > Path: localhost!evert
> > > Newsgroups: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?norge=2E=F8stfold?=
> > > Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 16:15:42 +0100
> > > From: "Evert Meulie esq." <evert@xxxxxxxxx>
> > > Sender: evert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > > Subject: Any Ostfold College students here?
> > 
> > I don't think the newsgroups header allows ISO-8859 encoding. AFAIK
> > newsgroups names must be plain ASCII. Therefore, if you replace the
> > Newsgroups: entry with the proper ASCII stuff, you should be fine.
> 
> But what if the original newsgroup name has a ISO-8859 char. in it?

I am in the process of discussing this with some people who know more
about RFCs than I do. It appears from a cursory glance that son-of-rfc1036
indeed allows non-ASCII chars in newsgroup names, but demands on the
other hand that transmission of articles must be accomplished with
ASCII chars < 127. This would mean (IMO) that

a) leafnode would have to decode the name by itself to match it against
   its internal database
b) the upstream server again would have to decode the name to match it
   against its database

In any case, people whom I showed the Newsgroups: header generally
reacted *very* surprised.

The easiest way to currently circumvent the problem is probably to
choose a different way of encoding the message: use 8-bit chars
instead of ISO-8859.

(How does one decode ISO-8859 headers? Doesn't sound like fun to me.)

--Cornelius.

-- 
/* Cornelius Krasel, U Wuerzburg, Dept. of Pharmacology, Versbacher Str. 9 */
/* D-97078 Wuerzburg, Germany   email: phak004@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  SP4 */
/* "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."  */

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