Usenet Etiquette - Please Read
The body of the article comes here, with no blank line.
An article consists of several header lines, followed by a
blank line, followed by the body of the message. The
header lines consist of a keyword, a colon, a blank, and
some additional information. This is a subset of the
ARPANET standard, simplified to allow simpler software to
handle it. The "from" line may optionally include a
full name, in the format above, or use the ARPANET angle
bracket syntax. To keep the implementations simple, other
formats (for example, with part of the machine address
after the close parenthesis) are not allowed. The ARPANET
convention of continuation header lines (beginning with a
blank or tab) is allowed.
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Certain headers are required, certain headers are
optional. Any unrecognized headers are allowed, and will
be passed through unchanged. The required headers are
Relay-Version, Posting-Version, From, Date, Newsgroups,
Subject, Message-ID, Path. The optional headers are
Followup-To, Date-Received, Expires, Reply-To, Sender,
References, Control, Distribution, Organization.
2.1 Required Headers
2.1.1 Relay-Version This header line shows the version
of the program responsible for the transmission of this
article over the immediate link, that is, the program that
is relaying the article from the next site. For example,
suppose site A sends an article to site B, and site B
forwards the article to site C. The message being
transmitted from A to B would have a Relay-Version header
identifying the program running on A, and the message
transmitted from B to C would identify the program running
on B. This header can be used to interpret older headers
in an upward compatible way. Relay-Version must always be
the first in a message; thus, all articles meeting this
standard will begin with an upper case "R". No other
restrictions are placed on the order of header lines.
The line contains two fields, separated by semicolons.
The fields are the version and the full domain name of the
site. The version should identify the system program used
(e.g., "B") as well as a version number and version
date. For example, the header line might contain
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 2/13/83; site cbosgd.UUCP
This header should not be passed on to additional sites.
A relay program, when passing an article on, should
include only its own Relay-Version, not the Relay-Version
of some other site. (For upward compatibility with older
software, if a Relay-Version is found in a header which is
not the first line, it should be assumed to be moved by an
older version of news and deleted.)
2.1.2 Posting-Version This header identifies the
software responsible for entering this message into the
network. It has the same format as Relay-Version. It
will normally identify the same site as the Message-ID,
unless the posting site is serving as a gateway for a
message that already contains a message ID generated by
mail. (While it is permissible for a gateway to use an
externally generated message ID, the message ID should be
checked to ensure it conforms to this standard and to RFC
822.)
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2.1.3 From The From line contains the electronic mailing
address of the person who sent the message, in the ARPA
internet syntax. It may optionally also contain the full
name of the person, in parentheses, after the electronic
address. The electronic address is the same as the entity
responsible for originating the article, unless the Sender
header is present, in which case the From header might not
be verified. Note that in all site and domain names,
upper and lower case are considered the same, thus
mark@cbosgd.UUCP, mark@cbosgd.uucp, and mark@CBosgD.UUcp
are all equivalent. User names may or may not be case
sensitive, for example, Billy@cbosgd.UUCP might be
different from BillY@cbosgd.UUCP. Programs should avoid
changing the case of electronic addresses when forwarding
news or mail.
RFC 822 specifies that all text in parentheses is to be
interpreted as a comment. It is common in ARPANET mail to
place the full name of the user in a comment at the end of
the From line. This standard specifies a more rigid
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