The need for two headers
Hadmut Danisch <[email protected]> Sat, 7 Feb 2004 13:01:32 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.mail.ng |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi, I'd propose to split the information which was stored in the RFC822 header into two, completely separate headers (maybe "header" isn't a good word anymore): - The inner header contains the data oriented to the message as generated at the sender's MUA, such as From: , To:, Date:, Subject: and such things. This header and the message body form the payload and will never ever be modified within mail transport. (Conversion of character encoding and such stone age things are obsoleted.) Any Signature, Encryption, Message Digest (e.g. as part of the message ID) do apply on this payload and thus this payload is a sequence of octets that will never change. Mime encoding is a matter of this inner container only. - The outer header (might be called "envelope") will be modified and extended by transport relays (Received:, address rewriting, etc.) It would contain things like envelope sender, envelope recipient, the message tag I've recently proposed, Whatever transport mechanism is used, either SMTP-like pushing, NNTP-like broadcast/multicast/pull, or mailing-list-like multicast, when relayed, forwarded, gatewayed or whatever, this should always affect the envelope only. regards Hadmut