[4386] in Athena Bugs
changes.70#189
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Basch)
Sat Mar 3 21:52:07 1990
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 90 21:51:37 -0500
To: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: hoffmann@MIT.EDU
From: Richard Basch <probe@MIT.EDU>
The following are observations of the behavior observed:
- I have my own From: field put in, and I put it after the To and
Subject. In this case, it does not get relocated.
- The header macros are identical on mail hub and the clients (actually,
they differ but only in the format of the Received line). The
ordering of the macros is also identical.
- If I leave out the From, it seems to be added above the Received of
the local host.
Section 4.1 of RFC 822, first paragraph of the note says (verbatim):
4. MESSAGE SPECIFICATION
4.1. SYNTAX
Note: Due to an artifact of the notational conventions, the syntax
indicates that, when present, some fields, must be in a particular
order. Header fields are NOT required to occur in any particualr order,
except that the message body must occur AFTER the headers. It is
recommended that, if present, headers be sent in the order
"Return-Path", "Received", "Date", "From", "Subject", "Sender", "To",
"cc", etc.
As can be seen, we are NOT in violation of the spec; CMU is in
violation: their software is requiring header fields to come in the
recommended order. There is nothing mandating the order of the headers,
as stated in the above quote, and it is sendmail that appears to be
munging on the order.
I can't seem to affect the order by changing sendmail.cf on the clients
(or at least not without deviating from the recommended order even
more).
Now that I have found the authoritative word on this matter, can we
finally close this non-bug report.
-Richard
