s-o-1036 June 1994

5. Mandatory Headers

An article MUST have one, and only one, of each of the  fol-
lowing headers: Date, From, Message-ID, Subject, Newsgroups,
Path.

     NOTE: MAIL specifies (if read most carefully) that
     there  must be exactly one Date header and exactly
     one From header, but otherwise does  not  restrict
     multiple  appearances  of  headers.   (Notably, it
     permits  multiple   Message-ID   headers!)    This
     appears  singularly  useless,  or even harmful, in
     the context of news, and much current  news  soft-
     ware  will  not  tolerate  multiple appearances of
     mandatory headers.

INTERNET DRAFT to be        NEWS                      sec. 5


Note also that there are situations, discussed in the  rele-
vant  parts  of  section  6,  where  References,  Sender, or
Approved headers are mandatory.

In the discussions of the individual headers, the content of
each is specified using the syntax notation.  The convention
used is that the content of, for example, the Subject header
is defined as <Subject-content>.