Re: nntp servers with multibyte group names?

[Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>]

Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:

> According to RFC 3977 (Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)):

>   "o  Although this specification allows UTF-8 for newsgroup names, they
>       SHOULD be restricted to US-ASCII until a successor to RFC 1036
>       [RFC1036] standardises another approach. 8-bit encodings SHOULD
>       NOT be used because they are likely to cause interoperability
>       problems."

>      - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3977#section-10

For a bit of background here, non-ASCII newsgroup names mostly work, and
are even used in some areas, but we saw a few instances of strange
behavior in some experiments.  However, putting raw UTF-8 directly into
the Newsgroups header breaks compatibility with RFC 5322 (email), which
prohibits non-ASCII characters in headers.

Email would say that you should MIME-encode those names, but that will
definitely break all Usenet software, which assumes that Newsgroups are
byte strings that don't require any further interpretation.  (And some of
the encoding characters are invalid in newsgroup names, I believe.)

We weren't able to find a good reconciliation of that conflict before the
IETF working group ran out of steam.

So you can probably just use raw UTF-8 directly in newsgroup names with a
local server, but expect some strangeness with some clients, and you are
(for whatever it's worth) breaking compatibility with the email standards
by doing so.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>