Date: 8 Mar 1996 02:59:55 GMT
Message-ID: <19960308025955.21229.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: Message format document outline

I've seen the following phenomenon from more than one MUA:

   To: one@some.domain,
     
     two@another.domain (An exceedingly long comment here, so long in fact that it goes past the edge)

I agree that this behavior is troublesome, because it is vulnerable to
corruption by low-quality gateways.

However, the resulting messages _do_ comply with 822. They have survived
and have been stored in people's mailboxes---and are handled correctly
by a bunch of different mail programs that I just tried.

You propose that an 822bis parser be allowed to incorrectly parse these
valid 822 messages, so that it is free to accommodate some non-822
messages produced by low-quality gateways. Did I get that right?

> DRUMS is not simply clarifying RFC822, but also changing it to reflect
> reality. 

RFC 822 is extremely well established, and compatibility is critical.
As RFC 1123 states: ``In fact, nearly all of the many formats of
RFC-822 are actually used, so an implementation generally needs to
recognize and correctly interpret all of the RFC-822 syntax.''

---Dan