questions about differences between RFC822, RFC2822

Thu Feb 19 18:44:47 PST 2004

Quoting Tim Mitchell (trm at eskimo.com):
> Could someone help me understand some of the differences between
> RFC822 and RFC2822 - summarize please? I am hoping to read the whole 

er, 20 years?   A lot of clarification?

822 and 821 could be a little vague (most DNS things post-dated it).

Unfo, in my view, 2822 and 2821 still invoke 822/821 rather than
entirely superceding them.

I'd rather have a doc, after 20 years, repeat stuff where necessary
and make me parse and backreference it's direct parent.

I'm pretty sure I'd never put exchange directly on the Internet.
I've certainly put proprietary systems behind solid Open Systems
(ok, Unix) running real MTAs (ok, sendmail.  perhaps postfix.)

> RFC2822 soon, but 48 pages is not quick. The issue is that my employer's 
> MS Exchange MTA servers are having problems sending mail to an Internet site 
> ( a huge one ) which choose to force compliance with RFC2822 instead of 
> only RFC822. They will not accept a mesage body which is not RFC2822. I know 
> that the Postfix MTA software which I use at home does work to this Internet 
> site.

It would help if you identified what was being rejected...
Lots of folks interpret the RFCs, er, creatively.  (see also
djb and how qmail handle's an MX box that responds, but temp
fails or refuses the connection (ie tcpwrappers). Easy ways
to stop mail from qmail and certain Exchange 5.5*beta* servers).
So they SHOULD be saying what's wrong such that they reject the
mail.  I'm not going to waste time guessing.

It might be interesting to know what the (large) site that's
demanding compliance is.

On a guess (ok, I lied), I block illegal Message-IDs and other things
like that.  With aplomb.  I enjoy that.

I also started blocking cable/dsl dynamic ranges to my large client.
Not delighted by that.  But < 1% of mail coming from them even
started to appear as legitimate.

<Editorial mode=rant>
> 	Currently work is MS Exchange 5.5 if that helps, to be upgraded
> to MS Exchange 2003 "before long". Not my choice which MTA work uses. But
> Postfix works just fine at my home domain/MX server. 

"Up"grade?  It's that like shooting better heroin?  Smoking better crack?
Eating higher quality mad cows? (introduced to the US in washington
state - coincidence?)

/me joyfully replace 10 AIX/Notes boxes with 1 (Sun) IMAP server
+ 2 netra's as MTAs and reduced delivery times from ~10min-6hrs
down to 2-3 seconds.   40,000 users.  1 box (plus RAID boxes).

But exchange/notes work better. And the calendar is part of email.

Recall too that ALL anti-virus work you do should be charged to
using Windows and ALL email borne viruses - that get automatically
triggered - ALL are Outlook problems.  They've patched the problems
that run code in "preview mode."  4 times now.
</Editorial>