Standards Reborne – SMTP and the Internet Message FormatWith remarkably little flag-waving1 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today published new updates to the venerable Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP, RFC5321) and Internet Message Format (RFC5322) standards. These documents are the most recent reflection of more than twenty-six years of effort that began when Jon Postel and Dave Crocker penned2 the early drafts of Request For Comments 821 and 822. Those standards created the email universe as we know it today, building on the cooperative structure I mentioned in an earlier post.
The most recent previous update to this pair of standards was in 2001, and an enormous amount of discussion and refinement has transpired since then. John Klensin and Pete Resnick are to be commended for their patience and perseverance in marshaling the ideas of the loosely allied (and occasionally antagonistic) participants in the “working groups” of academic and industry experts and engineers who finally reached this consensus. These new publications are draft standards, final specifications that are unlikely to change further.
What, then, does this mean to you as a user of the Internet for email? Surprisingly, almost nothing. These two standards do not introduce any new security features or delivery hurdles, although other forthcoming proposals may (so I’m not likely to run out of things to write about).
The IETF strives to produce standards that reflect widely accepted current practice. Publication must be supported by evidence of multiple, interoperable (e.g., successfully exchanging data) implementations of communication techniques and data formats. In this case, that means that RFCs 5321 and 5322 provide a detailed description of exactly how your email is already meant to be working. You shouldn’t need to change a thing.
Most importantly it means that everyone who wishes to engage in the free exchange of email on the Internet has a new and clearer definition of what to expect at the most basic level of communication between senders and recipients and among the servers that move messages from place to place. iPost works hard to make sure your messages, and our handling of them on your behalf, conform to these standards so that you can reach your email audience.
(Update 2008/10/02: MailChannels has a detailed list of the changes since the 2001 proposed standard.)
1Standards-bearing … get it?
2Typed, really, but “penned” sounds more elegant.
