Author: Always Learning Date: To: Exim Users Subject: Re: [exim] Exim Mailing List - Imposing Mimimum Technical Posting
Standards ?
Peter Bowyer wrote on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:29:35 +0100.
> No > Oh dear. Mine didn't. > No > No
But is this attitude, shared by others too, based upon the assumption
that merely because someone has not dictated by means of a RFC that
'To:' headers should be present in emails, sensible and even desirable
particularly when confronted with the fact that in 99.9999999999998% of
genuine emails, and in 100% of business emails, the 'To:' header is
present ?
Letting someone, in this instance the creator of an RFC, do one's
thinking and one's reasoning is not usually a desirable policy in any
walk of life unless one is incapable of making decisions based on
pragmatic commonsense.
The current RFC is 5322 dated October 2008.
3.6: The only required header fields are the origination date field
and the originator address field(s). All other header fields are
syntactically optional.
3.6.3: The "To:" field contains the address(es) of the primary
recipient(s) of the message.
Appendix A.1.1: Example message
----
From: John Doe <jdoe@???>
To: Mary Smith <mary@???>
Subject: Saying Hello
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 09:55:06 -0600
Message-ID: <1234@???>
This is a message just to say hello.
So, "Hello".
----
======
Admittedly it is easy, some think chic, to send an email without a 'To:'
header. Some spammers do it all the time BUT genuine emails always seem
have a 'To:' header. That is why I reject emails without a 'To:' header
and without other headers such as Message-Id:, Date: and From:.
Merely because there is no RFC in 2010 for a compulsory email 'To:'
header is hardly a good reason to ignore the fact that genuine emails
not sent to this mailing list always have a 'To:' header.
Should those on this list collectively improve standards, especially
with the intention of effectively tackling the menace of spam, by
enforcing minimum standards even if they are not yet written in a RFC
(which means Request for Comments) ?
