Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages (1977)

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PREFACE

 ARPA's  Committee  on  Computer-Aided  Human   Communication

(CAHCOM) wishes to promulgate a standard for the format of ARPA
Network text message (mail) headers which will reasonably meet
the needs of the various message service subsystems on the
Network today. The authors of this document constitute the
CAHCOM subcommittee charged with the task of developing this new
standard.

 Essentially, we specify a revision to  ARPANET  Request  for

Comments (RFC) 561, "Standardizing Network Mail Headers", and RFC
680, "Message Transmission Protocol". This revision removes and
compacts portions of the previous syntax and adds several
features to network address specification. In particular, we
focus on people and not mailboxes as recipients and allow
reference to stored address lists. We expect this syntax to
provide sufficient capabilities to meet most users' immediate
needs and, therefore, give developers enough breathing room to
produce a new mail transmission protocol "properly". We believe
that there is enough of a consensus in the Network community in
favor of such a standard syntax to make possible its adoption at
this time. An earlier draft of this specification was published
as RFC #724, "Proposed Official Standard for the Format of ARPA
Network Messages" and contained extensive discussion of the
background and issues in ARPANET mail standards.

 This specification was developed  over  the  course  of  one

year, using the ARPANET mail environment, itself, to provide an
on-going forum for discussing the capabilities to be included.
More than twenty individuals, from across the country,
participated in this discussion and we would like to acknowledge
their considerable efforts. The syntax of the standard was
originally specified in the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) meta-language.
Ken L. Harrenstien, of SRI International, was responsible for
re-coding the BNF into an augmented BNF which compacts the
specification and allows increased comprehensibility.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc733