Technical Summary
This document updates the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail
transport in such a manner as to move to Draft Standard. There are many
useful clarifications and syntax corrections. Not all possible changes
have been made, of course: changes were limited to those which can be made
while moving a document to Draft Standard, and for which consensus could
be demonstrated.
Working Group Summary
No working group is currently extant on this topic. This document was
extensively reviewed and interminably discussed on the ietf-822 mailing
list, which had been set up by DRUMS. Pointers to the discussions there
were periodically sent to other mailing lists populated with email people,
such as ietf-smtp, the EAI working group, the LEMONADE working group, and
the IMAP-EXT working group.
The current document represents consensus garnered on that list. One
issue was particularly difficult to gain consensus on: that of implicit
use of MX records. Since there was certainly not consensus to do anything
new, this revision of RFC2821 is conservative in describing existing
practice and avoiding making new requirements.
Document Quality
The current document represents implementation experience from the past 7
years in email.
This document was reviewed for the IESG by Lisa Dusseault.
Note to RFC Editor
(1) Rename section 2.3, now called "Terminology" to "SMTP
Terminology"
(2) Create a new section 1.5, titled "Document Conventions"
(3) Move the 2119 boilerplate from 2.3 to 1.5. That puts it
closer to the front of the document, where it probably belongs
anyway.
(4) Create a new, second (i.e., after the 2119 text), paragraph
of 1.5 that reads:
Because this document has a long history and to avoid
the risk of various errors and of confusing readers and
documents that point to this one, most examples and the
domain names they contain are preserved from RFC 2821.
Readers are cautioned that these are illustrative
examples that should not actually be used in either
code or configuration files.