The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:
- 'Simple Mail Transfer Protocol '
<draft-klensin-rfc2821bis-06.txt> as a Draft Standard
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing lists by 2007-12-24. Exceptionally,
comments may be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] instead. In either case, please
retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
I know that the IETF LC has ended, but I believe the issue is important
enough and hopefully will be addressed.
My co-worker has pointed out that RFC 821 allowed for space characters
(0x20) in local part of email addresses, but RFC 2821 and 2821bis don't
allow for that:
Local-part = Dot-string / Quoted-string
; MAY be case-sensitive
Dot-string = Atom *("." Atom)
Atom = 1*atext
Quoted-string = DQUOTE *qcontent DQUOTE
where qcontent is defined in RFC 2822 as:
qtext = NO-WS-CTL / ; Non white space controls
%d33 / ; The rest of the US-ASCII
%d35-91 / ; characters not including "\"
%d93-126 ; or the quote character
qcontent = qtext / quoted-pair
NO-WS-CTL = %d1-8 / ; US-ASCII control characters
%d11 / ; that do not include the
%d12 / ; carriage return, line feed,
%d14-31 / ; and white space characters
%d127
Was this change between RFC 821 and RFC 2821 intentional? Prohibition of
spaces in quoted parts breaks gatewaying to/from X.400 (MIXER, RFC 2156).
Regards,
Alexey
