RE: Multiple "To:" and "Cc:" header lines in SMTP messages

["John W. Noerenberg" <[e-mail]>]

At 11:44 AM -0400 9/26/96, [e-mail] wrote:
>tjm> I recently posted a similar inquiry to news and got a few
>tjm> responses.  From these it would seem that the only official
>tjm> statement is that provided by RFC 822.  Based on that, neither
>tjm> Microsoft nor Qualcomm are doing anything wrong but together
>tjm> their actions result in a problem.
>
>Although RFC-822 discourages multiple occurences of header fields that
>aren't explicitly allowed, in practice there should be little
>ambiguity in what to do.  Whereas if there were multiple DATE: fields,
>you wouldn't know what to do with them, it's pretty obvious what to do
>with multiple TO: fields.

Yep, all those other To: must be addresses that were supposed to be added
to the Bcc: field.

Ok, that's probably not what you meant. :-)

The problem is that *any* interpretation is guaranteed to be wrong to
someone because the specification explicitly states the semantics of
multiple occurences is undefined.  Consequently, the safest course for an
implementor wishing to avoid the ire of other implementors is to avoid the
generation of multiple occurences of addressee fields.

Having said that, it's worth considering collecting like-named addressee
headers into a single list for that header.  I agree a liberal
interpretation would be useful.

>
>If someone clarified things and specifically ruled out multiple TO:,
>CC:, etc, fields, I sure wouldn't get too lathered up trying to get
>everyone to be compliant.

I'm sure everyone participating in DRUMS will note this idea, Bill.

best,

john noerenberg
[e-mail]
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