<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<reference anchor="I-D.gondwana-email-header-maintenance" target="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-gondwana-email-header-maintenance-02">
   <front>
      <title>Maintenance of the IANA Message Header Field Registries</title>
      <author initials="B." surname="Gondwana" fullname="Bron Gondwana">
         <organization>Fastmail</organization>
      </author>
      <date month="July" day="29" year="2026" />
      <abstract>
	 <t>   The IANA &quot;Message Headers&quot; registries record, for each registered
   header field, the protocol it belongs to, its status, whether it is a
   trace field, and the document(s) that specify it.  These registries
   were populated incrementally by many documents over more than two
   decades, and the metadata that reached the registries is in several
   respects less complete than the metadata the registering documents
   supplied.  Most notably, the document that performed the single
   largest bulk registration, RFC 4021, gave IANA an explicit status and
   an explicit specification document for every one of the roughly
   ninety fields it registered, and neither was recorded: those entries
   carry a blank status and cite RFC 4021 itself rather than the
   specification.  Separately, the &quot;Trace&quot; column added to both
   registries by the ongoing revision of RFC 5322 was deliberately left
   empty for pre-existing entries, to be filled in later.

   This document reviews the initial definition of, and every subsequent
   update to, each registered header field, and gives IANA a single,
   coherent set of instructions for completing and correcting each
   registry entry.  Every recommended change, and every deliberate
   decision to leave a non-obvious entry unchanged, is justified by
   reference to the instructions already given by, or the clear intent
   of the authors of, the source documents in which the field was
   defined or modified.

	 </t>
      </abstract>
   </front>
   <seriesInfo name="Internet-Draft" value="draft-gondwana-email-header-maintenance-02" />
   
</reference>
