RFC 1892 (rfc1892) - Page 2 of 4

The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages

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