RFC 1830 (rfc1830) - Page 2 of 8
SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1830 Binary and Large Message Transport August 1995
This memo uses the mechanism defined in [ESMTP] to define two
extensions to the SMTP service whereby a client ("sender-SMTP") may
declare support for the message chunking transmission mode using the
BDAT command and support for the sending of Binary messages.
3. Framework for the Large Message Extensions
The following service extension is hereby defined:
1) The name of the data chunking service extension is
"CHUNKING".
2) The EHLO keyword value associated with this extension is
"CHUNKING".
3) A new SMTP verb is defined "BDAT" as an alternative to
the "DATA" command of [RFC 821]. The BDAT verb takes two
arguments. The first argument indicates the length of the
binary data packet. The second optional argument indicates
that the data packet is the last.
bdat-cmd ::= "BDAT" SP chunk-size
[ SP end-marker ] CR LF
chunk-size ::= 1*DIGIT
end-marker ::= "LAST"
The CHUNKING service extension enables the use of the BDAT
alternative to the DATA command. This extension can be used for any
message, whether 7 bit, 8BITMIME or BINARYMIME.
When a client SMTP wishes to submit (using the MAIL command) a large
message using the CHUNKING extension, it first issues the EHLO
command to the server SMTP. If the server SMTP responds with code
250 to the EHLO command, and the response includes the EHLO keyword
value CHUNKING, then the server SMTP is indicating that it supports
the BDAT command and will accept the sending of messages in chunks.
After all MAIL FROM and RCPT TO responses are collected and
processed, the message is sent using a series of BDAT commands. The
BDAT command takes one argument, the exact length of the data segment
in octets. The message data is sent immediately after the BDAT
command. Once the receiver-SMTP receives the specified number of
octets, it will return a 250 reply code.
The LAST parameter on the BDAT command indicates that this is the
last chunk of message data to be sent. Any BDAT command sent after
the BDAT LAST is illegal and must be replied to with a 503 "Bad
Vaudreuil Experimental