[apps-discuss] I-D Action: draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-01.txt

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A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories. This draft is a work item of the Applications Area Working Group Working Group of the IETF.

	Title           : Best Current Practices for Handling of Malformed Messages
	Author(s)       : Murray S. Kucherawy
	Filename        : draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-01.txt
	Pages           : 10
	Date            : 2012-02-29

   The email ecosystem has long had a very permissive set of common
   processing rules in place, despite increasingly rigid standards
   governing its components, ostensibly to improve the user experience.
   The handling of these come at some cost, and various components are
   faced with decisions about whether or not to permit non-conforming
   messages to continue toward their destinations unaltered, adjust them
   to conform (possibly at the cost of losing some of the original
   message), or outright rejecting them.

   This memo includes a collection of the best current practices in a
   variety of such situations, to be used as implementation guidance.
   It must be emphasized, however, that the intent of this memo is not
   to standardize malformations or otherwise encourage their
   proliferation.  The messages that are the subject of this memo are
   manifestly malformed, and the code and culture that generates them
   needs to be fixed.  Nevertheless, many malformed messages from
   otherwise legitimate senders are in circulation and will be for some
   time and, unfortunately, commercial reality shows that we cannot
   simply reject or discard them.  Accordingly, this memo presents
   recommendations for dealing with them in ways that seem to do the
   least additional harm until the infrastructure is tightened up to
   match the standards.


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