Received: from localhost by CS.UTK.EDU with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id HAA20104; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 07:02:11 -0400 X-Resent-To: drums@CS.UTK.EDU ; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 07:02:10 EDT Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE by CS.UTK.EDU with SMTP (cf v2.9s-UTK) id HAA20097; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 07:02:06 -0400 Message-Id: <199509191102.HAA20097@CS.UTK.EDU> Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE by SEARN.SUNET.SE (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7505; Tue, 19 Sep 95 13:02:08 +0200 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE (NJE origin ERIC@SEARN) by SEARN.SUNET.SE (LMail V1.2b/1.8b) with RFC822 id 5583; Tue, 19 Sep 1995 13:02:09 +0200 Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 12:57:08 +0200 From: Eric Thomas Subject: Re: "Comments" RFC 822 heading field To: ietf-drums , Jacob Palme In-Reply-To: Message of Tue, 19 Sep 1995 10:37:18 +0200 (MET DST) from Jacob Palme Personally, I view "Comments:" as a place where a piece of software can put some comment that will be available in the message header when the user requests to view all fields, that is, something slightly similar to "Received:" but with a free format. If there is a problem with the message, it is likely that the field will be viewed by an administrator during troubleshooting. This seems a good place to put comments like "During gatewaying from XYZnet at x.y.z, munging such and such had to be done because the user was not in the gateway's database", or "There were multiple From: lines and I picked one of them during the gatewaying, here are the others". I think it is useful as a free-form trace facility. I don't think it is reasonable to hope that the UA will show it to the end users when they read their mail, but of course, being a free-form comment this is clearly not disallowed. Eric