Network Working Group - Request for Comments: RFC 2034 www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc2034.html
Category: Standards Track - N. Freed, Innosoft, October 1996

Page 1

SMTP Service Extension for

Returning Enhanced Error Codes

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)
www.csi-ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/stdlist.htm#s1 for the standardization state and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

1 Abstract

This memo defines an extension to the SMTP service RFC-821 www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc0821.html
RFC- 1869] whereby an SMTP server augments its responses with the enhanced mail system status codes defined in RFC 1893  www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1893.html

These codes can then be used to provide more informative explanations of error conditions, especially in the context of the delivery status notifications format defined in RFC 1894
www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1894.html

2 Introduction

Although SMTP is widely and robustly deployed, various extensions have been requested by parts of the Internet community. In particular, in the modern, international, and multilingual Internet a need exists to assign codes to specific error conditions that can be translated into different languages.

RFC 1893 www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1893.html defines such a set of status codes and
RFC 1894 www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1894.html defines a mechanism to send such coded material to users.

However, in many cases the agent creating the RFC 1894 delivery status notification is doing so in response to errors it received from a remote SMTP server.

As such, remote servers need a mechanism for embedding enhanced status codes in their responses as well as a way to indicate to a client when they are in fact doing this.

This memo uses the SMTP extension mechanism described in RFC 1869 www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1869.html to define such a mechanism... Continue Next Page

 

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