Thanks John
Your comments are all very enlightening.
And i think I have to agree with all of them.
Your knowledge shines trough them all.
I can not wait to study your new 2821bis-draft
Is there a delay in this pipeline?
While I recently was studying the old RFC2821 I found a strange MUST about
relay-hosts.
RFC2821 section 3.7 last bit:
As discussed in section 2.4.1, a relay SMTP has no need to inspect or
act upon the headers or body of the message data and MUST NOT do so
except to add its own "Received:" header (section 4.4) and,
optionally, to attempt to detect looping in the mail system (see
section 6.2).
This MUST also implies that relay hosts that do inspect the message data MUST
NOT remove virusses and the likes from emails it relays.
Please comment on this.
Another (textual) suggestion:
Split the old big RFC 2821 sections up in smaller ones.
(it makes discussion about them easier)
Also to benefit the discussion:
Make seperate sections for
Originator systems (is this not the same as an RFC 2476- MSA?)
Delivery systems
Relay systems
and
Gateway Systems
(as mentioned in section 2.3.8)