Aeagle.642
                news.misc
                cbosgd!mhuxj!mhuxt!eagle!jerry
                Fri Nov 19 16:14:55 1982
                Usenet Etiquette - Please Read
                The body of the message comes here, with no blank line.

    A standard USENET message consists of several header lines, followed
    by a blank line, followed by the body of the message.  Each header




 
RFC 1036              Standard for USENET Messages         December 1987


    line consist of a keyword, a colon, a blank, and some additional
    information.  This is a subset of the Internet 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
    Internet 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 Internet convention of
    continuation header lines (beginning with a blank or tab) is
    allowed.

    Certain headers are required, and certain other headers are
    optional.  Any unrecognized headers are allowed, and will be passed
    through unchanged.  The required header lines are "From", "Date",
    "Newsgroups", "Subject", "Message-ID", and "Path".  The optional
    header lines are "Followup-To", "Expires", "Reply-To", "Sender",
    "References", "Control", "Distribution", "Keywords", "Summary",
    "Approved", "Lines", "Xref", and "Organization".  Each of these
    header lines will be described below.

2.1.  Required Header lines

2.1.1.  From

    The "From" line contains the electronic mailing address of the
    person who sent the message, in the 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 message, unless the
    "Sender" header is present, in which case the "From" header might
    not be verified.  Note that in all host and domain names, upper and
    lower case are considered the same, thus "mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM",
    "mark@cbosgd.att.com", and "mark@CBosgD.ATt.COm" are all equivalent.
    User names may or may not be case sensitive, for example,
    "Billy@cbosgd.ATT.COM" might be different from
    "BillY@cbosgd.ATT.COM".  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 Internet 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 syntax.  The full name is not
    considered a comment, but an optional part of the header line.
    Either the full name is omitted, or it appears in parentheses after
    the electronic address of the person posting the message, or it
    appears before an electronic address which is enclosed in angle
    brackets.  Thus, the three permissible forms are:






 
RFC 1036              Standard for USENET Messages         December 1987


              From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM
              From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton)
              From: Mark Horton <mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM>

    Full names may contain any printing ASCII characters from space
    through tilde, except that they may not contain "(" (left
    parenthesis), ")" (right parenthesis), "<" (left angle bracket), or
    ">" (right angle bracket).  Additional restrictions may be placed on
    full names by the mail standard, in particular, the characters ","
    (comma), ":" (colon), "@" (at), "!" (bang), "/" (slash), "="
    (equal), and ";" (semicolon) are inadvisable in full names.

2.1.2.  Date

    The "Date" line (formerly "Posted") is the date that the message was
    originally posted to the network.  Its format must be acceptable
    both in RFC-822 and to the getdate(3) routine that is provided with
    the Usenet software.  This date remains unchanged as the message is
    propagated throughout the network.  One format that is acceptable to
    both is:

                      Wdy, DD Mon YY HH:MM:SS TIMEZONE

    Several examples of valid dates appear in the sample message above.
    Note in particular that ctime(3) format: