[ih] Email behavior (better subject ID...)

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 04-Sep-21 16:16, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> I took a quick look at those RFCs, and the 5983 one.  RFCs 2369 and 2919 
> are "proposed standards" and 5983 is labelled "Experimental". Is there 
> some other place to look that indicates these were actually later 
> adopted as official "standards"?

No. The status indicated by the RFC Editor is definitive. If a document
has been obsoleted or updated, that is also indicated, so
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5983 tells you that RFC5983 has been
obsoleted by https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6783, which is
Informational.

As I think Fred Baker was the first to say, the Internet runs on Proposed
Standards (except when it's running on Historic, Experimental or
Informational RFCs, not to mention that the whole BGP-4 system ran on an
Internet-Draft for a while). Fortunately, running code trumps rough
consensus, and they both trump the formal standards process.

For an entertaining snapshot, see the following trio of entries from the
RFC index, and think about actual reality in mid-1994 (and note that
the first one is still officially a Draft Standard):

1629 Guidelines for OSI NSAP Allocation in the Internet. R. Colella, R.
     Callon, E. Gardner, Y. Rekhter. May 1994. (Format: TXT, HTML)
     (Obsoletes RFC1237) (Status: DRAFT STANDARD) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC1629) 


1630 Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW: A Unifying Syntax for the
     Expression of Names and Addresses of Objects on the Network as used
     in the World-Wide Web. T. Berners-Lee. June 1994. (Format: TXT,
     HTML) (Status: INFORMATIONAL) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC1630) 

1631 The IP Network Address Translator (NAT). K. Egevang, P. Francis. May
     1994. (Format: TXT, HTML) (Obsoleted by RFC3022) (Status:
     INFORMATIONAL) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC1631)

Regards,
    Brian

> 
> Regardless of their status, you just described exactly what I observed:  
> "Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them "   The 
> phrase "do something" doesn't sound like a definition of a standard.
> 
> Those RFCs seem to define the format of several "header fields", but say 
> nothing about how the information contained therein should be used by 
> mail senders, receivers, list managers, etc. as they handle mail.
> 
> An analogy might be that there are RFCs which define the format of TCP 
> and IP headers.  But they also define what the software handling those 
> datagrams should do with that information.  For example, the TCP header 
> contains a field for Sequence number, but it also specifies what a 
> program sending or receiving must do with the contents of those 
> fields.   They specify the Formats and the Protocols.
> 
> Just out of curiousity, I let my mail program display all headers, and I 
> looked at messages I've recently received on several dozen mailing 
> lists.  Surprisingly, many contain "List-*" fields.   But some have 
> several such fields, while others have only one.   Several mailing lists 
> have no List-* headers at all (e.g., nextdoor.com). It appears, from my 

> admittedly tiny data, that there are no standards for which of those 
> headers must be created when a message is sent to a list of people.
> 
> So, "Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them" is 
> the standard?
> 
> That's what I meant by "not being standardized or widely 
> implemented/adopted."  The formats are defined; the associated 
> protocol(s) are not.   (Or I'm just not aware of them, it's been a long 
> time since I was involved in mail protocols.)
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
> On 9/3/21 8:12 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> It appears that Jack Haverty via Internet-history <jack at 3kitty.org> said:
>>> I didn't know about those header fields until you pointed them out. ...
>>> fields.    Those headers are an example of what I meant as not being
>>> standardized or widely implemented/adopted.
>> Most of them were defined in RFC 2369 in 1998, List-ID by RFC 2919 in 2001.
>>
>> Lots of mail programs recognize them and do something with them, but
>> for some reason not Thunderbird.
>>
>> Thunderbird seems sort of stuck, getting upgrades thrown over the wall 
from
>> the Firefox project but still missing some fairly basic stuff like the 
list
>> headers.
>>
>> R's,
>> John
>>
>>
>>> On 9/3/21 1:18 PM, Bernie Cosell via Internet-history wrote:
>>>> i don't know about the links at the end, but do these links not work?
>>>> {in the header of every message}
>>>>
>>>> List-Id: "Discussions about Internet History."
>>>> <internet-history.elists.isoc.org>
>>>> List-Unsubscribe:
>>>> <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/options/internet-history>,
>>>> <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>>> List-Archive: <http://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/>
>>>> List-Post: <mailto:internet-history at elists.isoc.org>
>>>> List-Help: <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=help>
>>>> List-Subscribe:
>>>> <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history>,
>>>> <mailto:internet-history-request at elists.isoc.org?subject=subscribe>
> 
>