mark (06/09/82)
RFC733 is indeed a standard for the format of mail headers used on the arpanet. Most other mail software adheres to this standard, including Berkeley's Mail and Rand's MH systems. RFC733 is currently being updated. I have an old copy which I can post to net.sources if there is demand. Be warned that the document is 30 pages long, hard to understand, and full of lots of obscure information. It does have lots of examples. As I understand it, the major change being made to RFC733 is the syntax for electronic mailing addresses. The old syntax was USER@HOST where "user" is a login name and "host" is the name or nickname of a machine on the arpanet. Obviously this does not apply to UUCP addresses, which use ROUTE!USER. The new syntax will be USER@DOMAIN where DOMAIN is a heirarchy of names separated by periods, and USER is any string meaningful to that domain. Examples include old new POSTEL@ISIF POSTEL@F.ISI.ARPA cbosg!cbosgd!mark mark@cbosgd.uucp m.r.horton (post) m.r.horton@btl.phonenet Note that the highest level (ARPA, uucp, phonenet) is an identifier from a small set that every machine is supposed to recognize, and as you work to the left the names get more and more specific. This syntax has the property that a mailbox has the same name no matter where the sender is located, much like a U.S. Mail address. Upper/lower case doesn't matter in host names. ARPA refers to the arpanet and local nets attached to it. phonenet is the part of CSNET that works over dialup phone lines. This syntax will be in use by the end of 1982. UNIX software to deal with it will be on 4.2BSD which will be out in December. It appears that most of the world is going to switch to this syntax as soon as the arpanet does and the software is available. In addition to the ARPANET and CSNET, netnews is depending on this syntax to solve the reply problem (as arpanet links get used, replies don't work anymore with the current scheme) and it will become important to switch to this syntax to use netnews. Sites on uucp will have to switch over or be left in the dust. Mark
trb (06/09/82)
Today's episode of "A few minutes (wasted) with Andy Rooney Tannenbaum:" People blather and bitch until their faces turn blue about RFC733; what they are usually trying to say is that they want a blank line between the message header and the message body and, if they are even more picky, that they want the header fields to have colons after the header keywords. RFC733 is more than that, there's date formats and name formats and much much more, but, especially when people are complaining about the UNIX mailers, they are usually complaining about the From field without the colon and the lack of a blank line between the message header and body. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
smb (06/09/82)
RFC-733 is the ARPAnet standard for mail header lines. I have copies online, but it's about 73K bytes, so I don't want to spew out copies unnecessarily. Also, it's currently undergoing revision; the newest version is about 113K. Some time back, I posted a summary of RFC733 to the net; I'll be glad to update it and post a new one if there's sufficient interest. --Steve
djmdavies (06/10/82)
People who are interested in network message headers should be aware that there is a draft standard available from NBS for message headers. This draft is being studied within IFIP WG6.5, and may form the basis for eventual CCITT standardization. This proposed standard differs from RFC-733; it is language inddependant (using numeric codes rather than english keywords); and defines a superset of 733's list of fields. Anyone looking at Inter-networking of messages should be tracking this (I think). Probably the ARPAnet guys will stick with their english-only all-ASCII headers, I suppose. Probably USENET will also stick with the pseudo-RFC-733 headers now used, for internal distribution. [Are there any USENET sites in non-English-speaking countries?] Julian Davies, Univ. Western Ontario