🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, there are no articles here in this newsgroup, but it  seems  the
right place to ask, and maybe people will reply via email ...

What  I've been doing is writing my own program that grovels through a
message's headers and tries to generate headers for a reply.  I've got
it  working  pretty  well  in most cases, but there are quite a lot of
interesting and amusing headers that  I've  never  seen  and/or  don't
quite know how to decipher.  So I was wondering whether there might be
any sort of summary of what to expect from email headers.

There are of course some RFCs on this subject, but I  don't  have  any
Internet  access  at  the  moment, and so I don't know how to go about
finding out the latest suggestions there.  Even if I did,  it's  clear
that   many  implementors  consider  such  "standards"  to  be  merely
interesting guidelines, to be casually violated whenever they can come
up  with a Better Idea.  I'm more interested in what I can learn about
reality than about some committee's decrees.

Are there any useful summaries of existing email headers and the rules
(such  as  they  may be) for how they are formatted?  Or should I just
continue collecting headers and making my own guesses as to what  they
might possibly mean?

I've occasionally seen messages from several mailers'  daemons  (e.g.,
the  one  on  the snorkelwacker system) directed to my system's usenet
package, chiding it for the email paths it generates. Think of it: One
piece  of  software  is chewing out another for violating the former's
rules.  But perhaps I can do something  about  it  in  my  own  header
munger, if I can only learn more about what the rules might be.

-- 
All opinions Copyright (c) 1992 by John Chambers. Inquire for licensing at:
1-617-647-1813 ...!{bu.edu,harvard.edu,eddie.mit.edu,ruby.ora.com}!minya!jc 
--
Pensu tutmonde; agu loke.