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Re: (lack of) message header field ordering

2005-03-14 05:30:02

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, John C Klensin wrote:

And like X.400.  And, to a limited extent (motivated by trying
to maintain compatibility), like
draft-klensin-email-envelope-00.

It appears to continue the mistake of not allowing extensions to the trace
field syntax and semantics - though the draft doesn't clearly define the
contents of the ENVL .

Unless there is evidence to refute that conclusion, or at least a more
persuasive draft, the discussion about getting headers into the envelope
is probably a waste of time.  In other words, from my point of view at
least, this would be a good idea, and we could do it --although
certainly not overnight.  We just do not, in practice, care.

I think a simpler approach to this problem would be to encourage sites to
append locally defined trace information (e.g. anti-spam scores) to the
start of the header instead of the end, so that it appears interleaved
with the Received: fields. This makes it much clearer when a field was
added. A fair amount of software already does this, e.g. Delivered-To: and
X-Sieve: fields. It also happens to agree with the logic of DomainKeys
signatures :-)

Tony.
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