Internet DRAFT - draft-vaudreuil-1892bis
draft-vaudreuil-1892bis
Internet Draft Greg Vaudreuil
Obsoletes 1892 Lucent Technologies
Expires in six months August 8, 2002
The Multipart/Report Content Type
for the Reporting of
Mail System Administrative Messages
<draft-vaudreuil-1892bis-02.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026.
This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working
documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas,
and its Working Groups. Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet Drafts.
Internet Drafts are valid for a maximum of six months and may be
updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is
inappropriate to use Internet Drafts as reference material or to cite
them other than as a "work in progress".
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/1id-abstracts.html
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
This Internet-Draft is in conformance with Section 10 of RFC 2026.
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
Abstract
The Multipart/Report MIME content-type is a general "family" or
"container" type for electronic mail reports of any kind. Although
this memo defines only the use of the Multipart/Report content-type
with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs will
benefit if a single content-type is used to for all kinds of reports.
This document is part of a four document set describing the delivery
status report service. This collection includes the SMTP extensions
to request delivery status reports, a MIME content for the reporting
of delivery reports, an enumeration of extended status codes, and this
document describing a multipart container for the delivery report, the
original message, and a human-friendly summary of the failure.
Working Group Summary
RFC 1892 was a product of the Notary working group. This document is
a revision of that document providing clarifications as necessary to
advance to draft standard.
Document Conventions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [RFC2119].
Table of Contents
1. THE MULTIPART/REPORT CONTENT TYPE.................................3
2. THE TEXT/RFC822-HEADERS...........................................4
3. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS...........................................5
4. REFERENCES........................................................5
5. COPYRIGHT NOTICE..................................................6
6. AUTHOR'S ADDRESS..................................................6
APPENDIX A - CHANGES FROM RFC1893....................................7
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 2]
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
1. The Multipart/Report Content Type
The Multipart/Report MIME content-type is a general "family" or
"container" type for electronic mail reports of any kind. Although
this memo defines only the use of the Multipart/Report content-type
with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs will
benefit if a single content-type is used to for all kinds of reports.
The Multipart/Report content-type is defined as follows:
MIME type name: multipart
MIME subtype name: report
Required parameters: boundary, report-type
Optional parameters: none
Encoding considerations: 7bit should always be adequate
Security considerations: see section 4 of this memo.
The syntax of Multipart/Report is identical to the Multipart/Mixed
content type defined in [MIME]. When used to send a report, the
Multipart/Report content-type must be the top-level MIME content type
for any report message. The report-type parameter identifies the type
of report. The parameter is the MIME content sub-type of the second
body part of the Multipart/Report.
User agents and gateways must be able to automatically determine
that a message is a mail system report and should be processed as
such. Placing the Multipart/Report as the outermost content
provides a mechanism whereby an auto-processor may detect through
parsing the RFC 822 headers that the message is a report.
The Multipart/Report content-type contains either two or three sub-
parts, in the following order:
1) [Required] The first body part contains human readable message. The
purpose of this message is to provide an easily understood description
of the condition(s) that caused the report to be generated, for a
human reader who may not have an user agent capable of interpreting
the second section of the Multipart/Report.
The text in the first section may be in any MIME standards-track
content-type, charset, or language. Where a description of the error
is desired in several languages or several media, a
Multipart/Alternative construct may be used.
This body part may also be used to send detailed information that
cannot be easily formatted into a Message/Report body part.
(2) [Required] A machine parsable body part containing an account of
the reported message handling event. The purpose of this body part is
to provide a machine-readable description of the condition(s) that
caused the report to be generated, along with details not present in
the first body part that may be useful to human experts. An initial
body part, Message/delivery-status is defined in [DSN]
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 3]
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
(3) [Optional] A body part containing the returned message or a
portion thereof. This information may be useful to aid human experts
in diagnosing problems. (Although it may also be useful to allow the
sender to identify the message which the report was issued, it is
hoped that the envelope-id and original-recipient- address returned in
the Message/Report body part will replace the traditional use of the
returned content for this purpose.)
Return of content may be wasteful of network bandwidth and a variety
of implementation strategies can be used. Generally the sender should
choose the appropriate strategy and inform the recipient of the
required level of returned content required. In the absence of an
explicit request for level of return of content such as that provided
in [DRPT], the agent that generated the delivery service report should
return the full message content.
When data not encoded in 7 bits is to be returned, and the return path
is not guaranteed to be 8-bit capable, two options are available. The
original message MAY be re-encoded into a legal 7-bit MIME message or
the Text/RFC822-Headers content-type MAY be used to return only the
original message headers.
2. The Text/RFC822-Headers content-type
The Text/RFC822-Headers MIME content-type provides a
mechanism to label and return only the RFC 822 headers of
a failed message. These headers are not the complete
message and should not be returned as a Message/RFC822.
The returned headers are useful for identifying the
failed message and for diagnostics based on the received:
lines.
The Text/RFC822-Headers content-type is defined as follows:
MIME type name: Text
MIME subtype name: RFC822-Headers
Required parameters: None
Optional parameters: none
Encoding considerations: 7 bit is sufficient for normal RFC822
headers, however, if the headers are broken and require
encoding to make them legal 7 bit content, they may be
encoded in quoted-printable.
Security considerations: see section 3 of this memo.
The Text/RFC822-headers body part should contain all the RFC822 header
lines from the message which caused the report. The RFC822 headers
include all lines prior to the blank line in the message. They include
the MIME-Version and MIME Content- headers.
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 4]
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
3. Security Considerations
Automated use of report types without authentication presents several
security issues. Forging negative reports presents the opportunity
for denial-of-service attacks when the reports are used for automated
maintenance of directories or mailing lists. Forging positive reports
may cause the sender to incorrectly believe a message was delivered
when it was not
4. Normative References
[SMTP] Postel, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", STD 10, RFC 821,
USC/Information Sciences Institute, August 1982.
[DSN] Moore, K., and G. Vaudreuil, "An Extensible Message Format for
Delivery Status Notifications", <draft-vaudreuil-1893bis-02.txt>,
University of Tennessee, Lucent Technology, Work-in-Progress
[RFC822] Crocker, D., "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet Text
Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, UDEL, August 1982.
[MIME] Borenstein, N., and N. Freed, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME) Part Two: Media Types", RFC 2046, First Virtual,
Innosoft, November 1996.
[DRPT] Moore, K., "SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status
Notifications", <draft-moore-1891bis-01.txt>, University of Tennessee,
Work-in-Progress.
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 5]
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
5. Copyright Notice
"Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
in the Internet Standards process MUST be followed, or as required to
translate it into languages other than English.
The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT
NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN
WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
6. Author's Address
Gregory M. Vaudreuil
Lucent Technologies
17080 Dallas Parkway
Dallas, TX 75248-1905
Voice/Fax: +1-972-733-2722
GregV@ieee.org
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 6]
Internet Draft Multipart/Report August 8, 2002
Appendix A - Changes from RFC1892
Changed Authors contact information
Updated required standards boilerplate
Edited the text to make it spell-checker and grammar checker compliant
Vaudreuil Expires 2/8/03 [Page 7]
