Re: AOL changing subject headers?

[Dave Sill]

Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Yup. [AOL] are a 500 pound gorilla, but then again, have they violated 
>any RFC here? It doesn't seem so.

I'm not an RFC lawyer, but a quick look 821/822 doesn't turn up
anything that prohibits MTA's from arbitrarily munging messages. (!)
And, of course, that only covers MTA<->MTA transactions. Once the MTA
passes the message off to the MDA (delivery agent), all bets are off.

>Just because they're big doesn't mean they're by definition wrong here.

And just because they aren't violating an RFC (if, in fact, they
aren't) doesn't mean they're right, either.

In my opinion, any mail system that changes the contents of a message
beyond adding the RFC-821 Received header fields is "wrong". Of
course, any mail system that changes even one bit of the message body
will break most (all?) digital signature systems. Sure, there are
"harmless" header munges like canonifying domain names that won't
break anything, but those are definitely the exception.

-Dave