Re: Is this Received header correctly formatted?

[Eric A. Hall]

mouss wrote:
Eric A. Hall wrote:
Huh? The helo= stuff is inside the parenthesis. Perhaps I am missing
something but your point 3 seems to conflicewith your point 2.
comments are only allowed where whitespace occurs
can you give you me the line num in the rfc?
It's actually somewhat stricter than that, and actually says that 
comments can only be used where folding would occur (that's a 
hyper-techinical but accurate reading; see the robustness principle).

Here is what rfc2822 says:
3.2.3. Folding white space and comments
 [...]
   There are several places in this standard where comments and FWS may
   be freely inserted.  To accommodate that syntax, an additional token
   for "CFWS" is defined for places where comments and/or FWS can occur.
   However, where CFWS occurs in this standard, it MUST NOT be inserted
   in such a way that any line of a folded header field is made up
   entirely of WSP characters and nothing else.
FWS             =       ([*WSP CRLF] 1*WSP) /   ; Folding white space
                        obs-FWS
ctext           =       NO-WS-CTL /     ; Non white space controls
                        %d33-39 /       ; The rest of the US-ASCII
                        %d42-91 /       ;  characters not including "(",
                        %d93-126        ;  ")", or "\"
ccontent        =       ctext / quoted-pair / comment
comment         =       "(" *([FWS] ccontent) [FWS] ")"
CFWS            =       *([FWS] comment) (([FWS] comment) / FWS)
   Throughout this standard, where FWS (the folding white space token)
   appears, it indicates a place where header folding, as discussed in
   section 2.2.3, may take place.  Wherever header folding appears in a
   message (that is, a header field body containing a CRLF followed by
   any WSP), header unfolding (removal of the CRLF) is performed before
   any further lexical analysis is performed on that header field
   according to this standard.  That is to say, any CRLF that appears in
   FWS is semantically "invisible."
   A comment is normally used in a structured field body to provide some
   human readable informational text.  Since a comment is allowed to
   contain FWS, folding is permitted within the comment.  Also note that
   since quoted-pair is allowed in a comment, the parentheses and
   backslash characters may appear in a comment so long as they appear
   as a quoted-pair.  Semantically, the enclosing parentheses are not
   part of the comment; the comment is what is contained between the two
   parentheses.  As stated earlier, the "\" in any quoted-pair and the
   CRLF in any FWS that appears within the comment are semantically
   "invisible" and therefore not part of the comment either.
   Runs of FWS, comment or CFWS that occur between lexical tokens in a
   structured field header are semantically interpreted as a single
   space character.
RFC 2822 is slightly stricter than RFC 822 in this regard. And while 
it's not "full standard" like 822, it is a standards-track update to 822 
and was sanctioned by the IESG as such, and was developed after years of 
debate over good and bad behavior.

and even then, the original thing was:
Received: from ar39.lsanca2-4.16.241.28.lsanca2.elnk.dsl.genuity.net
([4.16.241.28] helo=watson1)
and here helo=watson1 is inside parens, and with withespace (before and 
after the parens). or am I missing something?
Check the BNF again.
--
Eric A. Hall                                      http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols        http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/