RFC 1894 (rfc1894) - Page 3 of 39
An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1894 Delivery Status Notifications January 1996 sender wants to report the problem to the remote MTA administrator. 1.2 Requirements These purposes place the following constraints on the notification protocol: (a) It must be readable by humans as well as being machine-parsable. (b) It must provide enough information to allow message senders (or the user agents) to unambiguously associate a DSN with the message that was sent and the original recipient address for which the DSN is issued (if such information is available), even if the message was forwarded to another recipient address. (c) It must be able to preserve the reason for the success or failure of a delivery attempt in a remote messaging system, using the "language" (mailbox addresses and status codes) of that remote system. (d) It must also be able to describe the reason for the success or failure of a delivery attempt, independent of any particular human language or of the "language" of any particular mail system. (e) It must preserve enough information to allow the maintainer of a remote MTA to understand (and if possible, reproduce) the conditions that caused a delivery failure at that MTA. (f) For any notifications issued by foreign mail systems, which are translated by a mail gateway to the DSN format, the DSN must preserve the "type" of the foreign addresses and error codes, so that these may be correctly interpreted by gateways. A DSN contains a set of per-message fields which identify the message and the transaction during which the message was submitted, along with other fields that apply to all delivery attempts described by the DSN. The DSN also includes a set of per-recipient fields to convey the result of the attempt to deliver the message to each of one or more recipients. 1.3 Terminology A message may be transmitted through several message transfer agents (MTAs) on its way to a recipient. For a variety of reasons, recipient addresses may be rewritten during this process, so each MTA may potentially see a different recipient address. Depending on the purpose for which a DSN is used, different formats of a particular recipient address will be needed. Moore & Vaudreuil Standards Track
