The Multipart/Report Media Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages
The multipart/report Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) media 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 media type with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs will benefit if a single media type is used for all kinds of reports. This memo obsoletes "The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages", RFC 3462, and marks RFC 3462 and it
Replaces RFC 1892: The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages, RFC 3462: The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages.
This document is current and has been amended. 1 later RFC has changed part of it. Nothing on the RFC itself tells you this.
Normative requirements
Every sentence in this RFC carrying an RFC 2119 keyword, with the section it came from. 2 must, 4 should, 5 may.
3 The Multipart/Report Media Type
- REQUIRED(REQUIRED) The first body part contains a human-readable message.
- MAYseveral media, a multipart/alternative construct MAY be used.
- MAYThis body part MAY also be used to send detailed information that cannot be easily formatted into the second body part.
- REQUIRED(REQUIRED) A machine-parsable body part containing an account of the reported message handling event.
- OPTIONAL(OPTIONAL) A body part containing the returned message or a portion thereof.
- SHOULDIn the absence of an explicit request for level of return of content such as that provided in [DSN-SMTP], the agent that generated the delivery service report SHOULD return the full message content.
- MAYThe original message MAY be re-encoded into a legal 7-bit MIME message or the text/rfc822-headers media type MAY be used to return only the original message headers.
4 The text/rfc822-headers Media Type
- SHOULD NOTThe header is not the complete message and SHOULD NOT be returned using the message/ rfc822 media type defined in [MIME-TYPES].
- MAYEncoding considerations: 7-bit is sufficient for normal mail headers, however, if the headers are broken or extended and require encoding to make them legal 7-bit content, they MAY be encoded with quoted-printable as defined in [MIME].
- SHOULDThe text/rfc822-headers body part SHOULD contain all the mail header fields from the message that caused the report.
5 Registering New Report Types
- SHOULDRegistration of new media types for the purpose of creating a new report format SHOULD note in the Intended Usage section of the media type registration that the type being registered is suitable for use as a report-type (i.e., the second body part) in the context of this specification.