RFC 1892 (rfc1892) - Page 1 of 4

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

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Network Working Group                                       G. Vaudreuil
Request for Comments: 1892                        Octel Network Services
Category: Standards Track                                   January 1996


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

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
   Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
   Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
   and status of this protocol.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

1. The Multipart/Report MIME content-type

   The Multipart/Report MIME content-type is a general "family" or
   "container" type for electronic mail reports of any kind. Although
   this memo defines only the use of the Multipart/Report content-type
   with respect to delivery status reports, mail processing programs
   will benefit if a single content-type is used to for all kinds of
   reports.

   The Multipart/Report content-type is defined as follows:

             MIME type name: multipart
             MIME subtype name: report
             Required parameters: boundary, report-type
             Optional parameters: none
             Encoding considerations: 7bit should always be adequate
             Security considerations: see section 4 of this memo.

   The syntax of Multipart/Report is identical to the Multipart/Mixed
   content type defined in [MIME].  When used to send a report, the
   Multipart/Report content-type must be the top-level MIME content type
   for any report message.  The report-type parameter identifies the
   type of report.  The parameter is the MIME content sub-type of the
   second body part of the Multipart/Report.

      User agents and gateways must be able to automatically determine
      that a message is a mail system report and should be processed as
      such.  Placing the Multipart/Report as the outermost content
      provides a mechanism whereby an auto-processor may detect through
      parsing the RFC 822 headers that the message is a report.




Vaudreuil                   Standards Track
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