RFC 1892 (rfc1892) - Page 2 of 4
The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1892 Multipart/Report January 1996 The Multipart/Report content-type contains either two or three sub- parts, in the following order: (1) [required] The first body part contains human readable message. The purpose of this message is to provide an easily-understood description of the condition(s) that caused the report to be generated, for a human reader who may not have an user agent capable of interpreting the second section of the Multipart/Report. The text in the first section may be in any MIME standards-track content-type, charset, or language. Where a description of the error is desired in several languages or several media, a Multipart/Alternative construct may be used. This body part may also be used to send detailed information that cannot be easily formatted into a Message/Report body part. (2) [required] A machine parsable body part containing an account of the reported message handling event. The purpose of this body part is to provide a machine-readable description of the condition(s) which caused the report to be generated, along with details not present in the first body part that may be useful to human experts. An initial body part, Message/delivery-status is defined in [DSN] (3) [optional] A body part containing the returned message or a portion thereof. This information may be useful to aid human experts in diagnosing problems. (Although it may also be useful to allow the sender to identify the message which the report was issued, it is hoped that the envelope-id and original-recipient- address returned in the Message/Report body part will replace the traditional use of the returned content for this purpose.) Return of content may be wasteful of network bandwidth and a variety of implementation strategies can be used. Generally the sender should choose the appropriate strategy and inform the recipient of the required level of returned content required. In the absence of an explicit request for level of return of content such as that provided in [DRPT], the agent which generated the delivery service report should return the full message content. When data not encoded in 7 bits is to be returned, and the return path is not guaranteed to be 8-bit capable, two options are available. The origional message MAY be reencoded into a legal 7 bit MIME message or the Text/RFC 822-Headers content-type MAY be used to return only the origional message headers. Vaudreuil Standards Track
