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Re: "More Stuff" in Received header

2005-09-12 04:39:47

On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, John Leslie wrote:

   It seems essential to me.

   We cannot claim to know everything about the action of receiving
an email at a SMTP server which may need to be recorded: thus we
need some mechanism for expanding what may be recorded.

   (Exactly how open-ended this mechanism needs to be is an area
for discussion.)

At the moment the common practice for adding extra information to
Received: lines is to use comments. This is particular common for
authentication information, and the lack of a standard in this area causes
problems for software like SpamAssassin which likes to be able to work out
if a Received: line corresponds to a relay or a submission hop. (RFC 3848
has helped a bit.) So this is a software interoperabilty matter as well as
being important for human comprehensibility.

If the syntax is made extensible, should there be an IANA registry for
Received: keywords?

Tony.
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