At 9:30 AM -0400 6/29/01, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
But I'm disturbed that Exchange is using the Precedence: line as its
selector mechanism. I'm hardly an email expert, but a quick grep
through the RFCs turned up exactly one mention of the Precedence:
header line. That reference is in 2076, which describes it as
"Non-standard, controversial, discouraged". No RFC definition is cited.
It would be nice if such an important feature relied only on
standardized headers.
Steve, we'll forgive you for not being an email expert. If you were
one, you would know that this topic, and half a dozen of related
meta-topics, have been beaten to death in the (finally dead!) DRUMS
WG, and on the ietf-822 mailing list in the past six or seven years.
A summary is that some implementations prefer to be strictly
standards-compliant but piss off their users by not doing enough,
while others choose to do things the users want even though it
doesn't go strictly by the standards. In this case, there are
non-standard headers in common use that give valuable heuristics to
programs, and no standard ones that give the same information. Many
companies, apparently including Microsoft, use that non-standard
information.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium