Network Working Group P. Resnick, Editor Request for Comments: 2822 QUALCOMM Incorporated Obsoletes: 822 April 2001 Category: Standards Track Internet Message Format Status of this Memo This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent between computer users, within the framework of "electronic mail" messages. This standard supersedes the one specified in Request For Comments (RFC) 822, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages", updating it to reflect current practice and incorporating incremental changes that were specified in other RFCs. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................... 3 1.1. Scope .................................................... 3 1.2. Notational conventions ................................... 4 1.2.1. Requirements notation .................................. 4 1.2.2. Syntactic notation ..................................... 4 1.3. Structure of this document ............................... 4 2. Lexical Analysis of Messages ............................... 5 2.1. General Description ...................................... 5 2.1.1. Line Length Limits ..................................... 6 2.2. Header Fields ............................................ 7 2.2.1. Unstructured Header Field Bodies ....................... 7 2.2.2. Structured Header Field Bodies ......................... 7 2.2.3. Long Header Fields ..................................... 7 2.3. Body ..................................................... 8 3. Syntax ..................................................... 9 3.1. Introduction ............................................. 9 3.2. Lexical Tokens ........................................... 9 Resnick Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 3.2.1. Primitive Tokens ....................................... 9 3.2.2. Quoted characters ......................................10 3.2.3. Folding white space and comments .......................11 3.2.4. Atom ...................................................12 3.2.5. Quoted strings .........................................13 3.2.6. Miscellaneous tokens ...................................13 3.3. Date and Time Specification ..............................14 3.4. Address Specification ....................................15 3.4.1. Addr-spec specification ................................16 3.5 Overall message syntax ....................................17 3.6. Field definitions ........................................18 3.6.1. The origination date field .............................20 3.6.2. Originator fields ......................................21 3.6.3. Destination address fields .............................22 3.6.4. Identification fields ..................................23 3.6.5. Informational fields ...................................26 3.6.6. Resent fields ..........................................26 3.6.7. Trace fields ...........................................28 3.6.8. Optional fields ........................................29 4. Obsolete Syntax ............................................29 4.1. Miscellaneous obsolete tokens ............................30 4.2. Obsolete folding white space .............................31 4.3. Obsolete Date and Time ...................................31 4.4. Obsolete Addressing ......................................33 4.5. Obsolete header fields ...................................33 4.5.1. Obsolete origination date field ........................34 4.5.2. Obsolete originator fields .............................34 4.5.3. Obsolete destination address fields ....................34 4.5.4. Obsolete identification fields .........................35 4.5.5. Obsolete informational fields ..........................35 4.5.6. Obsolete resent fields .................................35 4.5.7. Obsolete trace fields ..................................36 4.5.8. Obsolete optional fields ...............................36 5. Security Considerations ....................................36 6. Bibliography ...............................................37 7. Editor's Address ...........................................38 8. Acknowledgements ...........................................39 Appendix A. Example messages ..................................41 A.1. Addressing examples ......................................41 A.1.1. A message from one person to another with simple addressing .............................................41 A.1.2. Different types of mailboxes ...........................42 A.1.3. Group addresses ........................................43 A.2. Reply messages ...........................................43 A.3. Resent messages ..........................................44 A.4. Messages with trace fields ...............................46 A.5. White space, comments, and other oddities ................47 A.6. Obsoleted forms ..........................................47 Resnick Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 A.6.1. Obsolete addressing ....................................48 A.6.2. Obsolete dates .........................................48 A.6.3. Obsolete white space and comments ......................48 Appendix B. Differences from earlier standards ................49 Appendix C. Notices ...........................................50 Full Copyright Statement ......................................51 1. Introduction 1.1. Scope This standard specifies a syntax for text messages that are sent between computer users, within the framework of "electronic mail" messages. This standard supersedes the one specified in Request For Comments (RFC) 822, "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages" [RFC822], updating it to reflect current practice and incorporating incremental changes that were specified in other RFCs [STD3]. This standard specifies a syntax only for text messages. In particular, it makes no provision for the transmission of images, audio, or other sorts of structured data in electronic mail messages. There are several extensions published, such as the MIME document series [RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2049], which describe mechanisms for the transmission of such data through electronic mail, either by extending the syntax provided here or by structuring such messages to conform to this syntax. Those mechanisms are outside of the scope of this standard. In the context of electronic mail, messages are viewed as having an envelope and contents. The envelope contains whatever information is needed to accomplish transmission and delivery. (See [RFC2821] for a discussion of the envelope.) The contents comprise the object to be delivered to the recipient. This standard applies only to the format and some of the semantics of message contents. It contains no specification of the information in the envelope. However, some message systems may use information from the contents to create the envelope. It is intended that this standard facilitate the acquisition of such information by programs. This specification is intended as a definition of what message content format is to be passed between systems. Though some message systems locally store messages in this format (which eliminates the need for translation between formats) and others use formats that differ from the one specified in this standard, local storage is outside of the scope of this standard. Resnick Standards Track [Page 3] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 Note: This standard is not intended to dictate the internal formats used by sites, the specific message system features that they are expected to support, or any of the characteristics of user interface programs that create or read messages. In addition, this standard does not specify an encoding of the characters for either transport or storage; that is, it does not specify the number of bits used or how those bits are specifically transferred over the wire or stored on disk. 1.2. Notational conventions 1.2.1. Requirements notation This document occasionally uses terms that appear in capital letters. When the terms "MUST", "SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD NOT", and "MAY" appear capitalized, they are being used to indicate particular requirements of this specification. A discussion of the meanings of these terms appears in [RFC2119]. 1.2.2. Syntactic notation This standard uses the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation specified in [RFC2234] for the formal definitions of the syntax of messages. Characters will be specified either by a decimal value (e.g., the value %d65 for uppercase A and %d97 for lowercase A) or by a case-insensitive literal value enclosed in quotation marks (e.g., "A" for either uppercase or lowercase A). See [RFC2234] for the full description of the notation. 1.3. Structure of this document This document is divided into several sections. This section, section 1, is a short introduction to the document. Section 2 lays out the general description of a message and its constituent parts. This is an overview to help the reader understand some of the general principles used in the later portions of this document. Any examples in this section MUST NOT be taken as specification of the formal syntax of any part of a message. Section 3 specifies formal ABNF rules for the structure of each part of a message (the syntax) and describes the relationship between those parts and their meaning in the context of a message (the semantics). That is, it describes the actual rules for the structure of each part of a message (the syntax) as well as a description of the parts and instructions on how they ought to be interpreted (the semantics). This includes analysis of the syntax and semantics of Resnick Standards Track [Page 4] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 subparts of messages that have specific structure. The syntax included in section 3 represents messages as they MUST be created. There are also notes in section 3 to indicate if any of the options specified in the syntax SHOULD be used over any of the others. Both sections 2 and 3 describe messages that are legal to generate for purposes of this standard. Section 4 of this document specifies an "obsolete" syntax. There are references in section 3 to these obsolete syntactic elements. The rules of the obsolete syntax are elements that have appeared in earlier revisions of this standard or have previously been widely used in Internet messages. As such, these elements MUST be interpreted by parsers of messages in order to be conformant to this standard. However, since items in this syntax have been determined to be non-interoperable or to cause significant problems for recipients of messages, they MUST NOT be generated by creators of conformant messages. Section 5 details security considerations to take into account when implementing this standard. Section 6 is a bibliography of references in this document. Section 7 contains the editor's address. Section 8 contains acknowledgements. Appendix A lists examples of different sorts of messages. These examples are not exhaustive of the types of messages that appear on the Internet, but give a broad overview of certain syntactic forms. Appendix B lists the differences between this standard and earlier standards for Internet messages. Appendix C has copyright and intellectual property notices. 2. Lexical Analysis of Messages 2.1. General Description At the most basic level, a message is a series of characters. A message that is conformant with this standard is comprised of characters with values in the range 1 through 127 and interpreted as US-ASCII characters [ASCII]. For brevity, this document sometimes refers to this range of characters as simply "US-ASCII characters". Resnick Standards Track [Page 5] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 Note: This standard specifies that messages are made up of characters in the US-ASCII range of 1 through 127. There are other documents, specifically the MIME document series [RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2047, RFC2048, RFC2049], that extend this standard to allow for values outside of that range. Discussion of those mechanisms is not within the scope of this standard. Messages are divided into lines of characters. A line is a series of characters that is delimited with the two characters carriage-return and line-feed; that is, the carriage return (CR) character (ASCII value 13) followed immediately by the line feed (LF) character (ASCII value 10). (The carriage-return/line-feed pair is usually written in this document as "CRLF".) A message consists of header fields (collectively called "the header of the message") followed, optionally, by a body. The header is a sequence of lines of characters with special syntax as defined in this standard. The body is simply a sequence of characters that follows the header and is separated from the header by an empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF). 2.1.1. Line Length Limits There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementations which send, receive, or store Internet Message Format messages that simply cannot handle more than 998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line for robustness sake. However, there are so many implementations which (in compliance with the transport requirements of [RFC2821]) do not accept messages containing more than 1000 character including the CR and LF per line, it is important for implementations not to create such messages. The more conservative 78 character recommendation is to accommodate the many implementations of user interfaces that display these messages which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of more than 78 characters per line, in spite of the fact that such implementations are non-conformant to the intent of this specification (and that of [RFC2821] if they actually cause information to be lost). Again, even though this limitation is put on messages, it is encumbant upon implementations which display messages Resnick Standards Track [Page 6] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line (certainly at least up to the 998 character limit) for the sake of robustness. 2.2. Header Fields Header fields are lines composed of a field name, followed by a colon (":"), followed by a field body, and terminated by CRLF. A field name MUST be composed of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e., characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive), except colon. A field body may be composed of any US-ASCII characters, except for CR and LF. However, a field body may contain CRLF when used in header "folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3. All field bodies MUST conform to the syntax described in sections 3 and 4 of this standard. 2.2.1. Unstructured Header Field Bodies Some field bodies in this standard are defined simply as "unstructured" (which is specified below as any US-ASCII characters, except for CR and LF) with no further restrictions. These are referred to as unstructured field bodies. Semantically, unstructured field bodies are simply to be treated as a single line of characters with no further processing (except for header "folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3). 2.2.2. Structured Header Field Bodies Some field bodies in this standard have specific syntactical structure more restrictive than the unstructured field bodies described above. These are referred to as "structured" field bodies. Structured field bodies are sequences of specific lexical tokens as described in sections 3 and 4 of this standard. Many of these tokens are allowed (according to their syntax) to be introduced or end with comments (as described in section 3.2.3) as well as the space (SP, ASCII value 32) and horizontal tab (HTAB, ASCII value 9) characters (together known as the white space characters, WSP), and those WSP characters are subject to header "folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3. Semantic analysis of structured field bodies is given along with their syntax. 2.2.3. Long Header Fields Each header field is logically a single line of characters comprising the field name, the colon, and the field body. For convenience however, and to deal with the 998/78 character limitations per line, the field body portion of a header field can be split into a multiple line representation; this is called "folding". The general rule is Resnick Standards Track [Page 7] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 that wherever this standard allows for folding white space (not simply WSP characters), a CRLF may be inserted before any WSP. For example, the header field: Subject: This is a test can be represented as: Subject: This is a test Note: Though structured field bodies are defined in such a way that folding can take place between many of the lexical tokens (and even within some of the lexical tokens), folding SHOULD be limited to placing the CRLF at higher-level syntactic breaks. For instance, if a field body is defined as comma-separated values, it is recommended that folding occur after the comma separating the structured items in preference to other places where the field could be folded, even if it is allowed elsewhere. The process of moving from this folded multiple-line representation of a header field to its single line representation is called "unfolding". Unfolding is accomplished by simply removing any CRLF that is immediately followed by WSP. Each header field should be treated in its unfolded form for further syntactic and semantic evaluation. 2.3. Body The body of a message is simply lines of US-ASCII characters. The only two limitations on the body are as follows: - CR and LF MUST only occur together as CRLF; they MUST NOT appear independently in the body. - Lines of characters in the body MUST be limited to 998 characters, and SHOULD be limited to 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. Note: As was stated earlier, there are other standards documents, specifically the MIME documents [RFC2045, RFC2046, RFC2048, RFC2049] that extend this standard to allow for different sorts of message bodies. Again, these mechanisms are beyond the scope of this document. Resnick Standards Track [Page 8] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 3. Syntax 3.1. Introduction The syntax as given in this section defines the legal syntax of Internet messages. Messages that are conformant to this standard MUST conform to the syntax in this section. If there are options in this section where one option SHOULD be generated, that is indicated either in the prose or in a comment next to the syntax. For the defined expressions, a short description of the syntax and use is given, followed by the syntax in ABNF, followed by a semantic analysis. Primitive tokens that are used but otherwise unspecified come from [RFC2234]. In some of the definitions, there will be nonterminals whose names start with "obs-". These "obs-" elements refer to tokens defined in the obsolete syntax in section 4. In all cases, these productions are to be ignored for the purposes of generating legal Internet messages and MUST NOT be used as part of such a message. However, when interpreting messages, these tokens MUST be honored as part of the legal syntax. In this sense, section 3 defines a grammar for generation of messages, with "obs-" elements that are to be ignored, while section 4 adds grammar for interpretation of messages. 3.2. Lexical Tokens The following rules are used to define an underlying lexical analyzer, which feeds tokens to the higher-level parsers. This section defines the tokens used in structured header field bodies. Note: Readers of this standard need to pay special attention to how these lexical tokens are used in both the lower-level and higher-level syntax later in the document. Particularly, the white space tokens and the comment tokens defined in section 3.2.3 get used in the lower-level tokens defined here, and those lower-level tokens are in turn used as parts of the higher-level tokens defined later. Therefore, the white space and comments may be allowed in the higher-level tokens even though they may not explicitly appear in a particular definition. 3.2.1. Primitive Tokens The following are primitive tokens referred to elsewhere in this standard, but not otherwise defined in [RFC2234]. Some of them will not appear anywhere else in the syntax, but they are convenient to refer to in other parts of this document. Resnick Standards Track [Page 9] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 Note: The "specials" below are just such an example. Though the specials token does not appear anywhere else in this standard, it is useful for implementers who use tools that lexically analyze messages. Each of the characters in specials can be used to indicate a tokenization point in lexical analysis. 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 text = %d1-9 / ; Characters excluding CR and LF %d11 / %d12 / %d14-127 / obs-text specials = "(" / ")" / ; Special characters used in "<" / ">" / ; other parts of the syntax "[" / "]" / ":" / ";" / "@" / "\" / "," / "." / DQUOTE No special semantics are attached to these tokens. They are simply single characters. 3.2.2. Quoted characters Some characters are reserved for special interpretation, such as delimiting lexical tokens. To permit use of these characters as uninterpreted data, a quoting mechanism is provided. quoted-pair = ("\" text) / obs-qp Where any quoted-pair appears, it is to be interpreted as the text character alone. That is to say, the "\" character that appears as part of a quoted-pair is semantically "invisible". Note: The "\" character may appear in a message where it is not part of a quoted-pair. A "\" character that does not appear in a quoted-pair is not semantically invisible. The only places in this standard where quoted-pair currently appears are ccontent, qcontent, dcontent, no-fold-quote, and no-fold-literal. Resnick Standards Track [Page 10] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 3.2.3. Folding white space and comments White space characters, including white space used in folding (described in section 2.2.3), may appear between many elements in header field bodies. Also, strings of characters that are treated as comments may be included in structured field bodies as characters enclosed in parentheses. The following defines the folding white space (FWS) and comment constructs. Strings of characters enclosed in parentheses are considered comments so long as they do not appear within a "quoted-string", as defined in section 3.2.5. Comments may nest. There are several places in this standard where comments and FWS may be freely inserted. To accommodate that syntax, an additional token for "CFWS" is defined for places where comments and/or FWS can occur. However, where CFWS occurs in this standard, it MUST NOT be inserted in such a way that any line of a folded header field is made up entirely of WSP characters and nothing else. FWS = ([*WSP CRLF] 1*WSP) / ; Folding white space obs-FWS ctext = NO-WS-CTL / ; Non white space controls %d33-39 / ; The rest of the US-ASCII %d42-91 / ; characters not including "(", %d93-126 ; ")", or "\" ccontent = ctext / quoted-pair / comment comment = "(" *([FWS] ccontent) [FWS] ")" CFWS = *([FWS] comment) (([FWS] comment) / FWS) Throughout this standard, where FWS (the folding white space token) appears, it indicates a place where header folding, as discussed in section 2.2.3, may take place. Wherever header folding appears in a message (that is, a header field body containing a CRLF followed by any WSP), header unfolding (removal of the CRLF) is performed before any further lexical analysis is performed on that header field according to this standard. That is to say, any CRLF that appears in FWS is semantically "invisible." A comment is normally used in a structured field body to provide some human readable informational text. Since a comment is allowed to contain FWS, folding is permitted within the comment. Also note that since quoted-pair is allowed in a comment, the parentheses and Resnick Standards Track [Page 11] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 backslash characters may appear in a comment so long as they appear as a quoted-pair. Semantically, the enclosing parentheses are not part of the comment; the comment is what is contained between the two parentheses. As stated earlier, the "\" in any quoted-pair and the CRLF in any FWS that appears within the comment are semantically "invisible" and therefore not part of the comment either. Runs of FWS, comment or CFWS that occur between lexical tokens in a structured field header are semantically interpreted as a single space character. 3.2.4. Atom Several productions in structured header field bodies are simply strings of certain basic characters. Such productions are called atoms. Some of the structured header field bodies also allow the period character (".", ASCII value 46) within runs of atext. An additional "dot-atom" token is defined for those purposes. atext = ALPHA / DIGIT / ; Any character except controls, "!" / "#" / ; SP, and specials. "$" / "%" / ; Used for atoms "&" / "'" / "*" / "+" / "-" / "/" / "=" / "?" / "^" / "_" / "`" / "{" / "|" / "}" / "~" atom = [CFWS] 1*atext [CFWS] dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS] dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext) Both atom and dot-atom are interpreted as a single unit, comprised of the string of characters that make it up. Semantically, the optional comments and FWS surrounding the rest of the characters are not part of the atom; the atom is only the run of atext characters in an atom, or the atext and "." characters in a dot-atom. Resnick Standards Track [Page 12] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 3.2.5. Quoted strings Strings of characters that include characters other than those allowed in atoms may be represented in a quoted string format, where the characters are surrounded by quote (DQUOTE, ASCII value 34) characters. 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 quoted-string = [CFWS] DQUOTE *([FWS] qcontent) [FWS] DQUOTE [CFWS] A quoted-string is treated as a unit. That is, quoted-string is identical to atom, semantically. Since a quoted-string is allowed to contain FWS, folding is permitted. Also note that since quoted-pair is allowed in a quoted-string, the quote and backslash characters may appear in a quoted-string so long as they appear as a quoted-pair. Semantically, neither the optional CFWS outside of the quote characters nor the quote characters themselves are part of the quoted-string; the quoted-string is what is contained between the two quote characters. As stated earlier, the "\" in any quoted-pair and the CRLF in any FWS/CFWS that appears within the quoted-string are semantically "invisible" and therefore not part of the quoted-string either. 3.2.6. Miscellaneous tokens Three additional tokens are defined, word and phrase for combinations of atoms and/or quoted-strings, and unstructured for use in unstructured header fields and in some places within structured header fields. word = atom / quoted-string phrase = 1*word / obs-phrase Resnick Standards Track [Page 13] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 utext = NO-WS-CTL / ; Non white space controls %d33-126 / ; The rest of US-ASCII obs-utext unstructured = *([FWS] utext) [FWS] 3.3. Date and Time Specification Date and time occur in several header fields. This section specifies the syntax for a full date and time specification. Though folding white space is permitted throughout the date-time specification, it is RECOMMENDED that a single space be used in each place that FWS appears (whether it is required or optional); some older implementations may not interpret other occurrences of folding white space correctly. date-time = [ day-of-week "," ] date FWS time [CFWS] day-of-week = ([FWS] day-name) / obs-day-of-week day-name = "Mon" / "Tue" / "Wed" / "Thu" / "Fri" / "Sat" / "Sun" date = day month year year = 4*DIGIT / obs-year month = (FWS month-name FWS) / obs-month month-name = "Jan" / "Feb" / "Mar" / "Apr" / "May" / "Jun" / "Jul" / "Aug" / "Sep" / "Oct" / "Nov" / "Dec" day = ([FWS] 1*2DIGIT) / obs-day time = time-of-day FWS zone time-of-day = hour ":" minute [ ":" second ] hour = 2DIGIT / obs-hour minute = 2DIGIT / obs-minute second = 2DIGIT / obs-second zone = (( "+" / "-" ) 4DIGIT) / obs-zone Resnick Standards Track [Page 14] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 The day is the numeric day of the month. The year is any numeric year 1900 or later. The time-of-day specifies the number of hours, minutes, and optionally seconds since midnight of the date indicated. The date and time-of-day SHOULD express local time. The zone specifies the offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, formerly referred to as "Greenwich Mean Time") that the date and time-of-day represent. The "+" or "-" indicates whether the time-of-day is ahead of (i.e., east of) or behind (i.e., west of) Universal Time. The first two digits indicate the number of hours difference from Universal Time, and the last two digits indicate the number of minutes difference from Universal Time. (Hence, +hhmm means +(hh * 60 + mm) minutes, and -hhmm means -(hh * 60 + mm) minutes). The form "+0000" SHOULD be used to indicate a time zone at Universal Time. Though "-0000" also indicates Universal Time, it is used to indicate that the time was generated on a system that may be in a local time zone other than Universal Time and therefore indicates that the date-time contains no information about the local time zone. A date-time specification MUST be semantically valid. That is, the day-of-the-week (if included) MUST be the day implied by the date, the numeric day-of-month MUST be between 1 and the number of days allowed for the specified month (in the specified year), the time-of-day MUST be in the range 00:00:00 through 23:59:60 (the number of seconds allowing for a leap second; see [STD12]), and the zone MUST be within the range -9959 through +9959. 3.4. Address Specification Addresses occur in several message header fields to indicate senders and recipients of messages. An address may either be an individual mailbox, or a group of mailboxes. address = mailbox / group mailbox = name-addr / addr-spec name-addr = [display-name] angle-addr angle-addr = [CFWS] "<" addr-spec ">" [CFWS] / obs-angle-addr group = display-name ":" [mailbox-list / CFWS] ";" [CFWS] Resnick Standards Track [Page 15] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 display-name = phrase mailbox-list = (mailbox *("," mailbox)) / obs-mbox-list address-list = (address *("," address)) / obs-addr-list A mailbox receives mail. It is a conceptual entity which does not necessarily pertain to file storage. For example, some sites may choose to print mail on a printer and deliver the output to the addressee's desk. Normally, a mailbox is comprised of two parts: (1) an optional display name that indicates the name of the recipient (which could be a person or a system) that could be displayed to the user of a mail application, and (2) an addr-spec address enclosed in angle brackets ("<" and ">"). There is also an alternate simple form of a mailbox where the addr-spec address appears alone, without the recipient's name or the angle brackets. The Internet addr-spec address is described in section 3.4.1. Note: Some legacy implementations used the simple form where the addr-spec appears without the angle brackets, but included the name of the recipient in parentheses as a comment following the addr-spec. Since the meaning of the information in a comment is unspecified, implementations SHOULD use the full name-addr form of the mailbox, instead of the legacy form, to specify the display name associated with a mailbox. Also, because some legacy implementations interpret the comment, comments generally SHOULD NOT be used in address fields to avoid confusing such implementations. When it is desirable to treat several mailboxes as a single unit (i.e., in a distribution list), the group construct can be used. The group construct allows the sender to indicate a named group of recipients. This is done by giving a display name for the group, followed by a colon, followed by a comma separated list of any number of mailboxes (including zero and one), and ending with a semicolon. Because the list of mailboxes can be empty, using the group construct is also a simple way to communicate to recipients that the message was sent to one or more named sets of recipients, without actually providing the individual mailbox address for each of those recipients. 3.4.1. Addr-spec specification An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@", ASCII value 64) followed by an Internet domain. The locally interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom. If the string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it contains no characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded by atext Resnick Standards Track [Page 16] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the quoted-string form SHOULD NOT be used. Comments and folding white space SHOULD NOT be used around the "@" in the addr-spec. addr-spec = local-part "@" domain local-part = dot-atom / quoted-string / obs-local-part domain = dot-atom / domain-literal / obs-domain domain-literal = [CFWS] "[" *([FWS] dcontent) [FWS] "]" [CFWS] dcontent = dtext / quoted-pair dtext = NO-WS-CTL / ; Non white space controls %d33-90 / ; The rest of the US-ASCII %d94-126 ; characters not including "[", ; "]", or "\" The domain portion identifies the point to which the mail is delivered. In the dot-atom form, this is interpreted as an Internet domain name (either a host name or a mail exchanger name) as described in [STD3, STD13, STD14]. In the domain-literal form, the domain is interpreted as the literal Internet address of the particular host. In both cases, how addressing is used and how messages are transported to a particular host is covered in the mail transport document [RFC2821]. These mechanisms are outside of the scope of this document. The local-part portion is a domain dependent string. In addresses, it is simply interpreted on the particular host as a name of a particular mailbox. 3.5 Overall message syntax A message consists of header fields, optionally followed by a message body. Lines in a message MUST be a maximum of 998 characters excluding the CRLF, but it is RECOMMENDED that lines be limited to 78 characters excluding the CRLF. (See section 2.1.1 for explanation.) In a message body, though all of the characters listed in the text rule MAY be used, the use of US-ASCII control characters (values 1 through 8, 11, 12, and 14 through 31) is discouraged since their interpretation by receivers for display is not guaranteed. Resnick Standards Track [Page 17] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 message = (fields / obs-fields) [CRLF body] body = *(*998text CRLF) *998text The header fields carry most of the semantic information and are defined in section 3.6. The body is simply a series of lines of text which are uninterpreted for the purposes of this standard. 3.6. Field definitions The header fields of a message are defined here. All header fields have the same general syntactic structure: A field name, followed by a colon, followed by the field body. The specific syntax for each header field is defined in the subsequent sections. Note: In the ABNF syntax for each field in subsequent sections, each field name is followed by the required colon. However, for brevity sometimes the colon is not referred to in the textual description of the syntax. It is, nonetheless, required. It is important to note that the header fields are not guaranteed to be in a particular order. They may appear in any order, and they have been known to be reordered occasionally when transported over the Internet. However, for the purposes of this standard, header fields SHOULD NOT be reordered when a message is transported or transformed. More importantly, the trace header fields and resent header fields MUST NOT be reordered, and SHOULD be kept in blocks prepended to the message. See sections 3.6.6 and 3.6.7 for more information. The only required header fields are the origination date field and the originator address field(s). All other header fields are syntactically optional. More information is contained in the table following this definition. fields = *(trace *(resent-date / resent-from / resent-sender / resent-to / resent-cc / resent-bcc / resent-msg-id)) *(orig-date / from / sender / reply-to / Resnick Standards Track [Page 18] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 to / cc / bcc / message-id / in-reply-to / references / subject / comments / keywords / optional-field) The following table indicates limits on the number of times each field may occur in a message header as well as any special limitations on the use of those fields. An asterisk next to a value in the minimum or maximum column indicates that a special restriction appears in the Notes column. Field Min number Max number Notes trace 0 unlimited Block prepended - see 3.6.7 resent-date 0* unlimited* One per block, required if other resent fields present - see 3.6.6 resent-from 0 unlimited* One per block - see 3.6.6 resent-sender 0* unlimited* One per block, MUST occur with multi-address resent-from - see 3.6.6 resent-to 0 unlimited* One per block - see 3.6.6 resent-cc 0 unlimited* One per block - see 3.6.6 resent-bcc 0 unlimited* One per block - see 3.6.6 resent-msg-id 0 unlimited* One per block - see 3.6.6 orig-date 1 1 from 1 1 See sender and 3.6.2 Resnick Standards Track [Page 19] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 sender 0* 1 MUST occur with multi- address from - see 3.6.2 reply-to 0 1 to 0 1 cc 0 1 bcc 0 1 message-id 0* 1 SHOULD be present - see 3.6.4 in-reply-to 0* 1 SHOULD occur in some replies - see 3.6.4 references 0* 1 SHOULD occur in some replies - see 3.6.4 subject 0 1 comments 0 unlimited keywords 0 unlimited optional-field 0 unlimited The exact interpretation of each field is described in subsequent sections. 3.6.1. The origination date field The origination date field consists of the field name "Date" followed by a date-time specification. orig-date = "Date:" date-time CRLF The origination date specifies the date and time at which the creator of the message indicated that the message was complete and ready to enter the mail delivery system. For instance, this might be the time that a user pushes the "send" or "submit" button in an application program. In any case, it is specifically not intended to convey the time that the message is actually transported, but rather the time at which the human or other creator of the message has put the message into its final form, ready for transport. (For example, a portable computer user who is not connected to a network might queue a message Resnick Standards Track [Page 20] RFC 2822 Internet Message Format April 2001 for delivery. The origination date is intended to contain the date and time that the user queued the message, not the time when the user connected to the network to send the message.) 3.6.2. Originator fields The originator fields of a message consist of the from field, the sender field (when applicable), and optionally the reply-to field. The from field consists of the field name "From" and a comma-separated list of one or more mailbox specifications. If the from field contains more than one mailbox specification in the mailbox-list, then the sender field, containing the field name "Sender" and a single mailbox specification, MUST appear in the message. In either case, an optional reply-to field MAY also be included, which contains the field name "Reply-To" and a comma-separated list of one or more addresses. from = "From:" mailbox-list CRLF sender = "Sender:" mailbox CRLF reply-to = "Reply-To:" address-list CRLF The originator fields indicate the mailbox(es) of the source of the message. The "From:" field specifies the author(s) of the message, that is, the mailbox(es) of the person(s) or system(s) responsible for the writing of the message. The "Sender:" field specifies the mailbox of the agent responsible for the actual transmission of the message. For example, if a secretary were to send a message for another person, the mailbox of the secretary would appear in the "Sender:" field and the mailbox of the actual author would appear in the "From:" field. If the originator of the message can be indicated by a single mailbox and the author and transmitter are identical,