RFC 3464 (rfc3464) - Page 2 of 40

An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications

RFC 3464             Delivery Status Notifications          January 2003


Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................3
     1.1 Purposes .....................................................3
     1.2 Requirements .................................................4
     1.3 Terminology ..................................................5
   2. Format of a Delivery Status Notification ........................7
     2.1 The message/delivery-status content-type .....................9
      2.1.1 General conventions for DSN fields ........................9
      2.1.2 "*-type" sub-fields .......................................9
      2.1.3 Lexical tokens imported from RFC 822 .....................10
     2.2 Per-Message DSN Fields ......................................11
      2.2.1 The Original-Envelope-Id field ...........................11
      2.2.2 The Reporting-MTA DSN field ..............................12
      2.2.3 The DSN-Gateway field ....................................13
      2.2.4 The Received-From-MTA DSN field ..........................14
      2.2.5 The Arrival-Date DSN field ...............................14
     2.3 Per-Recipient DSN fields ....................................14
      2.3.1 Original-Recipient field .................................15
      2.3.2 Final-Recipient field ....................................15
      2.3.3 Action field .............................................16
      2.3.4 Status field .............................................18
      2.3.5 Remote-MTA field .........................................19
      2.3.6 Diagnostic-Code field ....................................19
      2.3.7 Last-Attempt-Date field ..................................20
      2.3.8 final-log-id field .......................................20
      2.3.9 Will-Retry-Until field ...................................20
     2.4 Extension fields ............................................21
   3. Conformance and Usage Requirements .............................22
   4. Security Considerations ........................................23
     4.1 Forgery .....................................................23
     4.2 Confidentiality .............................................23
     4.3 Non-Repudiation .............................................25
   5. References .....................................................25
   6. Acknowledgments ................................................26
   Appendix A - Collected Grammar ....................................27
   Appendix B - Guidelines for Gatewaying DSNS .......................29
     Gatewaying from other mail systems to DSNs ......................29
     Gatewaying from DSNs to other mail systems ......................30
   Appendix C - Guidelines for Use of DSNS By Mailing List Exploders .30
   Appendix D - IANA Registration Forms for DSN Types ................31
     IANA registration form for address-type .........................32
     IANA registration form for diagnostic-type ......................32
     IANA registration form for MTA-name-type ........................32
   Appendix E - Examples .............................................33
     Simple DSN ......................................................34
     Multi-Recipient DSN .............................................35
     DSN from gateway to foreign system ..............................36



Moore & Vaudreuil           Standards Track