What happened to RFCs?

Posted by nuxi on 2007-Oct-11 at 00:01:58 in Computers (Login to reply)

This is a snippet of headers from two emails sent from my gmail account to my MTU email account (which forwards to tesla) and my local mail account:

MTU copy:
Return-Path: prvs=jon787=797db2745@gmail.com

Direct copy:
Return-Path: jon787@gmail.com

Last I heard (and I could be wrong) was that only gmail.com's servers were supposed to be modifing the part to the left of the @ symbol. They do this to my outbound email too. I had to reconfigure my mailserver to run this regex on inbound email becuase of this same shit. I'm still bitter that I had to work around their broken server, but they are uninterested in fixing this blatant RFC violation.

Now let's see what the RFCs have anything to say about this:

A host that is forwarding the message but is not the destination host implied by the right-hand side "domain" MUST NOT interpret or modify the "local-part" of the address. - Section 5.2.16 of RFC 1123, October 1989

Hey look at that. Not even a new RFC, that one is nearly 20 years old. I found another, this one is marked as an update to RFC 1123:

Consequently, and due to a long history of problems when intermediate hosts have attempted to optimize transport by modifying them, the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address. - Section 2.3.10 of RFC 2821, April 2001 (emphasis mine)

History of problems you say? NO WAI! The only reason I even noticed this was because of mysteriously missing bounce messages. I think we could even consider anti-spam stuff (I've traced this stupidity to the IronPort anti-spam server) as "optimization" so they are doing exactly the thing the RFC was specifically worded to stop!