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

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From: Brad Knowles <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 15:04:42 +0200

>    of two vendors using the same field name for different

    s/acronym/name/g

-- 
  These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
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From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 00:54:56 +1000

Date:        Thu, 8 Apr 1999 12:10:38 +0200
    From:        Jacob Palme <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <v04020a10b3322e68bade@[130.237.161.11]>

  | Perhaps the DRUMS document should be modified to indicate
  | that "X-"headers should have the format "X-<vnd>-header"

The alternative is to make it quite clear that X headers should
never be used for anything (and ideally should never be transmitted
eitehr).  They're a poor idea, with almost no rational use.

kre

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From: Brad Knowles <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 17:12:09 +0200

>eitehr).  They're a poor idea, with almost no rational use.

    They've been encouraged for far too long to attempt to deprecate them
now.  In fact, the current (and proposed draft) standard says that before
a header can become an "official" header, it must first pass through the
"Experimental" stage!

    However, we do need some language that makes it clear that refusing
to accept a message or otherwise taking any undesirable action in the
face of unexpected input on an X- header is NOT allowed, as there are
almost certainly going to be collisions between these headers and people
need to write their programs expecting that.

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 16:35:45 -0400

> eitehr).  They're a poor idea, with almost no rational use.

Problem is, vendors are going to put their vendor-specific
information somewhere.  They will either do it in X- headers and
leave the rest of the header name space alone, or they will define 
their own header names which will cause conflicts not only with 
other vendors, but also with things we want to standardize in 
the future.

But as I told Jacob in private mail, it's too late for DRUMS to
say anything about this.  We need to get the DRUMS work out the 
door, and we can't do that by opening up new issues.

Keith