Internet Draft                                       Greg Vaudreuil
     Expires in six months                           Lucent Technologies
                                                          April 16, 2002
  
  
                       The Multipart/Report Content Type
                              for the Reporting of
                      Mail System Administrative Messages
  
                        <draft-vaudreuil-1892bis-01.txt>
  
  
  
  Status of this Memo
  
     This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
     provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026.
  
     This document is an Internet Draft.  Internet Drafts are working
     documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its Areas,
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  Copyright Notice
  
     Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.
  
     This Internet-Draft is in conformance with Section 10 of RFC 2026.
  
  
  
     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
  Abstract
  
     The Multipart/Report MIME content-type is a general "family" or
     "container" type for electronic mail reports of any kind. Although
     this memo defines only the use of the Multipart/Report content-type
     with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs will
     benefit if a single content-type is used to for all kinds of reports.
  
     This document is part of a four document set describing the delivery
     status report service.  This collection includes the SMTP extensions
     to request delivery status reports, a MIME content for the reporting
     of delivery reports, an enumeration of extended status codes, and this
     document describing a multipart container for the delivery report, the
     original message, and a human-friendly summary of the failure.
  
  Working Group Summary
  
     RFC 1892 was a product of the Notary working group.  This document is
     a revision of that document providing clarifications as necessary to
     advance to draft standard.
  
  Document Conventions
  
     The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
     "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
     document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [RFC2119].
  
  Table of Contents
  
     1. THE MULTIPART/REPORT CONTENT TYPE.................................3
     2. THE TEXT/RFC822-HEADERS...........................................4
     3. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS...........................................5
     4. REFERENCES........................................................5
     5. COPYRIGHT NOTICE..................................................6
     6. AUTHOR'S ADDRESS..................................................6
     APPENDIX A - CHANGES FROM RFC1893....................................7
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
  1. The Multipart/Report Content Type
  
     The Multipart/Report MIME content-type is a general "family" or
     "container" type for electronic mail reports of any kind. Although
     this memo defines only the use of the Multipart/Report content-type
     with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs will
     benefit if a single content-type is used to for all kinds of reports.
  
     The Multipart/Report content-type is defined as follows:
  
        MIME type name: multipart
        MIME subtype name: report
        Required parameters: boundary, report-type
        Optional parameters: none
        Encoding considerations: 7bit should always be adequate
        Security considerations: see section 4 of this memo.
  
     The syntax of Multipart/Report is identical to the Multipart/Mixed
     content type defined in [MIME].  When used to send a report, the
     Multipart/Report content-type must be the top-level MIME content type
     for any report message.  The report-type parameter identifies the type
     of report.  The parameter is the MIME content sub-type of the second
     body part of the Multipart/Report.
  
     User agents and gateways must be able to automatically determine
     that a message is a mail system report and should be processed as
     such.  Placing the Multipart/Report as the outermost content
     provides a mechanism whereby an auto-processor may detect through
     parsing the RFC 822 headers that the message is a report.
  
     The Multipart/Report content-type contains either two or three sub-
     parts, in the following order:
  
     1) [Required] The first body part contains human readable message. The
     purpose of this message is to provide an easily understood description
     of the condition(s) that caused the report to be generated, for a
     human reader who may not have an user agent capable of interpreting
     the second section of the Multipart/Report.
  
     The text in the first section may be in any MIME standards-track
     content-type, charset, or language.  Where a description of the error
     is desired in several languages or several media, a
     Multipart/Alternative construct may be used.
  
     This body part may also be used to send detailed information that
     cannot be easily formatted into a Message/Report body part.
  
     (2) [Required] A machine parsable body part containing an account of
     the reported message handling event. The purpose of this body part is
     to provide a machine-readable description of the condition(s) that
     caused the report to be generated, along with details not present in
     the first body part that may be useful to human experts.  An initial
     body part, Message/delivery-status is defined in [DSN]
  
  
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     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
     (3) [Optional] A body part containing the returned message or a
     portion thereof.  This information may be useful to aid human experts
     in diagnosing problems.  (Although it may also be useful to allow the
     sender to identify the message which the report was issued, it is
     hoped that the envelope-id and original-recipient- address returned in
     the Message/Report body part will replace the traditional use of the
     returned content for this purpose.)
  
     Return of content may be wasteful of network bandwidth and a variety
     of implementation strategies can be used.  Generally the sender should
     choose the appropriate strategy and inform the recipient of the
     required level of returned content required.  In the absence of an
     explicit request for level of return of content such as that provided
     in [DRPT], the agent that generated the delivery service report should
     return the full message content.
  
     When data not encoded in 7 bits is to be returned, and the return path
     is not guaranteed to be 8-bit capable, two options are available.  The
     original message MAY be re-encoded into a legal 7-bit MIME message or
     the Text/RFC822-Headers content-type MAY be used to return only the
     original message headers.
  
   2. The Text/RFC822-Headers content-type
  
                 The Text/RFC822-Headers MIME content-type provides a
                 mechanism to label and return only the RFC 822 headers of
                 a failed message.  These headers are not the complete
                 message and should not be returned as a Message/RFC822.
                 The returned headers are useful for identifying the
                 failed message and for diagnostics based on the received:
                 lines.
  
      The Text/RFC822-Headers content-type is defined as follows:
  
          MIME type name: Text
          MIME subtype name: RFC822-Headers
          Required parameters: None
          Optional parameters: none
          Encoding considerations: 7 bit is sufficient for normal RFC822
                    headers, however, if the headers are broken and require
                    encoding to make them legal 7 bit content, they may be
                    encoded in quoted-printable.
          Security considerations: see section 3 of this memo.
  
     The Text/RFC822-headers body part should contain all the RFC822 header
     lines from the message which caused the report.  The RFC822 headers
     include all lines prior to the blank line in the message. They include
     the MIME-Version and MIME Content- headers.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
  3. Security Considerations
  
     Automated use of report types without authentication presents several
     security issues.  Forging negative reports presents the opportunity
     for denial-of-service attacks when the reports are used for automated
     maintenance of directories or mailing lists.  Forging positive reports
     may cause the sender to incorrectly believe a message was delivered
     when it was not
  
  4. References
  
     [SMTP] Postel, J., "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol", STD 10, RFC 821,
     USC/Information Sciences Institute, August 1982.
  
     [DSN] Moore, K., and G. Vaudreuil, "An Extensible Message Format for
     Delivery Status Notifications", RFC 1894, University of Tennessee,
     Octel Network Services, January 1996.
  
     [RFC822] Crocker, D., "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet Text
     Messages", STD 11, RFC 822, UDEL, August 1982.
  
     [MIME] Borenstein, N., and N. Freed, "Multipurpose Internet Mail
     Extensions", RFC 1521, Bellcore, Innosoft, June 1992.
  
     [DRPT] Moore, K., "SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status
     Notifications", RFC 1891, University of Tennessee, January 1996.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
     5. Copyright Notice
  
     "Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002). All Rights Reserved.
  
     This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
     others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
     or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
     distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
     provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
     included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
     document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
     the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
     Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
     Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
     in the Internet Standards process MUST be followed, or as required to
     translate it into languages other than English.
  
     The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
     revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
  
     This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
     "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
     TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT
     NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN
     WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
     MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
  
  6. Author's Address
  
     Gregory M. Vaudreuil
     Lucent Technologies
     17080 Dallas Parkway
     Dallas, TX 75248-1905
     Voice/Fax: +1-972-733-2722
     GregV@ieee.org
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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     Internet Draft          Multipart/Report             April 16, 2002
  
  
  Appendix A - Changes from RFC1892
  
     Changed Authors contact information
  
     Updated required standards boilerplate
  
     Edited the text to make it spell-checker and grammar checker compliant
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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