On Sat, 21 Dec 1996 03:32:32 GMT Daniel Norton <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>Is that like not being 100% pregnant?
 
No, it's  like RFC822 being  buggy and US-centric.  Why don't you  take a
look at  the date  examples in RFC822  and you'll see  what I  mean about
bugs. As for being US-centric, well,  imagine you're in 1985 and you have
to convince your boss to change the time zone on the system from "EST" to
"P" because  a consortium  of Japanese decided  that, outside  Japan, all
time zones  had to be  labeled per the  Japanese military system,  and US
Eastern time is "P", not "EST". The Japanese had been kind enough to also
allow you to  use -0400, although your operating system  didn't accept it
since in the real world a  time zone is three alphabetical characters and
they had never  heard of this Japanese network called  "ARPANET", not did
they  see any  reason to  change  their systems  to adapt  to them.  Fast
forward to 1996. Just as there are still a lot of people using EST, there
are also a lot of people using their own time zone names. To date US time
zones remain allowed while non-US ones  MUST be given in the numeric form
(this  follows from  the application  of the  various rules  in RFC1123).
LISTSERV's interpretation is that the  time zone can be anything although
LISTSERV strives  to use the +/-nnnn  form for the headers  it generates.
I'm sorry to hear that there is software that rejects mail due to invalid
time  zones, and  I think  that software  is broken.  There is  certainly
plenty of  useful information for a  human reader to recover  even if the
silly time zone is invalid.
 
  Eric