Subject: X-headers cause uexpected behavior

From: Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 12:10:38 +0200

I recently got a message from a developer who had put his
own e-mail header "X-Message:" for special private needs of
his application. However, this user had found that this
caused confusion to MS Outlook, which also seemed to be
X-Message:" for its alternative uses.

Perhaps the DRUMS document should be modified to indicate
that "X-"headers should have the format "X-<vnd>-header"
where <vnd> might for example be MS, so that future
Microsoft private headers should be for example
"X-MS-Message" instead of just "X-Message". This might
avoid future similar problems.

I know this is not 100% safe, to get that we would have to
adopt object identifiers, which is probably not so popular,
but it would at least reduce the risk of this kind of
problem a lot.

Perhaps add the following text to the end of chapter 3.6.8
in draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-07.txt:

    Private, non-standardized optional-fields should contain
    the acronym of the vendor in order to avoid the risk
    of two vendors using the same field name for different
    purposes?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <[email-masked]> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme