The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Advice for Safe Handling of Malformed Messages' (draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail-11.txt) as Informational RFC This document is the product of the Applications Area Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-malformed-mail/ Technical Summary The document provides a collection of the best advice available regarding a variety of common malformed mail situations, to be used as implementation guidance. The intended status is Informational as the document provides guidance instead of setting best current practices. Review and Consensus The document was originally intended as best current practices for handling malformed messages. There was a discussion about doing a registry of malformations and their corresponding handling advice, rather than updating an RFC whenever the list changes, but some thought that violations of a protocol specification do not qualify as protocol parameters. It was suggested to use a wiki. In the end, the working group decided on using an Informational document that provides advice about the safe handling of malformed messages as it did not make sense to have a uniform policy (BCP) for dealing with malformed messages, but there was a view that it was in the best interest of everyone to document less-harmful avenues to take. During the working group discussions it was mentioned that the robustness principle has had some controversy over the years because deployed servers that accepted non-compliant messages were responsible for widespread deployment of broken clients. This resulted in "standards creep" where new servers were forced to accept common but erroneous messages and protocol usage, and that made it harder to develop extensions. There was a comment that the market exerts strong pressures on receivers to accept malformed messages if the receivers can possibly make sense of them, and it was pointed out that enforcement of RFC 5322 and its predecessors tend to cause loss of legitimate messages instead of just discarding unwanted messages. This led to discussions about the related mail-related standards, MIME, and about examples of malformed messages. The only noteworthy controversy was about the original intended status of the document. There were reviews from Dave Crocker, John Levine, and Alexey Melnikov. Timo Sirainen reviewed the document from an IMAP developer's point of view. The document has the consensus of the working group. Personnel The document shepherd is S. Moonesamy. The Responsible Area Director is Barry Leiba.
