Network Working Group                                            J. Lyon
Request for Comments: 4407                               Microsoft Corp.
Category: Experimental                                      April 2006


            Purported Responsible Address in E-Mail Messages

 Status of This Memo

   This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
   community.  It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
   Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

 Copyright Notice

   Copyright © The Internet Society (2006).

 IESG Note

   The following documents  (RFC 4405, RFC 4406, RFC 4407, and RFC 4408)
   are published simultaneously as Experimental RFCs, although there is
   no general technical consensus and efforts to reconcile the two
   approaches have failed.  As such, these documents have not received
   full IETF review and are published "AS-IS" to document the different
   approaches as they were considered in the MARID working group.

   The IESG takes no position about which approach is to be preferred
   and cautions the reader that there are serious open issues for each
   approach and concerns about using them in tandem.  The IESG believes
   that documenting the different approaches does less harm than not
   documenting them.

   Note that the Sender ID experiment may use DNS records that may have
   been created for the current SPF experiment or earlier versions in
   this set of experiments.  Depending on the content of the record,
   this may mean that Sender-ID heuristics would be applied incorrectly
   to a message.  Depending on the actions associated by the recipient
   with those heuristics, the message may not be delivered or may be
   discarded on receipt.

   Participants relying on Sender ID experiment DNS records are warned
   that they may lose valid messages in this set of circumstances.
   Participants publishing SPF experiment DNS records should consider
   the advice given in section 3.4 of RFC 4406 and may wish to publish
   both v=spf1 and spf2.0 records to avoid the conflict.





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   Participants in the Sender-ID experiment need to be aware that the
   way Resent-* header fields are used will result in failure to receive
   legitimate email when interacting with standards-compliant systems
   (specifically automatic forwarders which comply with the standards by
   not adding Resent-* headers, and systems which comply with RFC 822
   but have not yet implemented RFC 2822 Resent-* semantics).  It would
   be inappropriate to advance Sender-ID on the standards track without
   resolving this interoperability problem.

   The community is invited to observe the success or failure of the two
   approaches during the two years following publication, in order that
   a community consensus can be reached in the future.

 Abstract

   This document defines an algorithm by which, given an e-mail message,
   one can extract the identity of the party that appears to have most
   proximately caused that message to be delivered.  This identity is
   called the Purported Responsible Address (PRA).

 Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................2
      1.1. Conventions Used in This Document ..........................3
   2. Determining the Purported Responsible Address ...................3
   3. Security Considerations .........................................5
   4. Acknowledgements ................................................5
   5. References ......................................................5
      5.1. Normative References .......................................5
      5.2. Informative References .....................................5

1.  Introduction

   Most e-mail flows relatively directly from a sender to a recipient,
   with a small number of Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs) in between.  Some
   messages, however, are resent by forwarding agents, mailing list
   servers, and other such software.  These messages effectively result
   in two or more mail transactions: one from the sender to the
   forwarding agent, and another from the agent to the destination.

   In some cases, messages travel through more than one of these agents.
   This can occur, for example, when one mailing list is subscribed to
   another, or when the address subscribed to a mailing list is a
   forwarding service.

   Further complicating the situation, in some cases the party that
   introduces a message is not the author of the message.  For example,
   many news web sites have a "Mail this article" function that the



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   public can use to e-mail a copy of the article to a friend.  In this
   case, the mail is "from" the person who pressed the button, but is
   physically sent by the operator of the web site.

   This document defines a new identity associated with an e-mail
   message, called the Purported Responsible Address (PRA), which is
   determined by inspecting the header of the message.  The PRA is
   designed to be the entity that (according to the header) most
   recently caused the message to be delivered.

   Note that the results of this algorithm are only as truthful as the
   headers contained in the message; if a message contains fraudulent or
   incorrect headers, this algorithm will yield an incorrect result.
   For this reason, the result of the algorithm is called the "Purported
   Responsible Address" -- "purported" because it tells you what a
   message claims about where it came from, but not necessarily where it
   actually came from.

   This document does not prescribe any particular uses for the
   Purported Responsible Address.  However, [RFC 4406] describes a method
   of determining whether a particular MTA is authorized to send mail on
   behalf of the domain contained in the PRA.

1.1.  Conventions Used in This Document

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC 2119].

2.  Determining the Purported Responsible Address

   The PRA of a message is determined by the following algorithm:

   1. Select the first non-empty Resent-Sender header in the message.
      If no such header is found, continue with step 2.  If it is
      preceded by a non-empty Resent-From header and one or more
      Received or Return-Path headers occur after said Resent-From
      header and before the Resent-Sender header, continue with step 2.
      Otherwise, proceed to step 5.

   2. Select the first non-empty Resent-From header in the message.  If
      a Resent-From header is found, proceed to step 5.  Otherwise,
      continue with step 3.

   3. Select all the non-empty Sender headers in the message.  If there
      are no such headers, continue with step 4.  If there is exactly
      one such header, proceed to step 5.  If there is more than one
      such header, proceed to step 6.



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   4. Select all the non-empty From headers in the message.  If there is
      exactly one such header, continue with step 5.  Otherwise, proceed
      to step 6.

   5. A previous step has selected a single header from the message.  If
      that header is malformed (e.g., it appears to contain multiple
      mailboxes, or the single mailbox is hopelessly malformed, or the
      single mailbox does not contain a domain name), continue with step
      6.  Otherwise, return that single mailbox as the Purported
      Responsible Address.

   6. The message is ill-formed, and it is impossible to determine a
      Purported Responsible Address.

   For the purposes of this algorithm, a header field is "non-empty" if
   and only if it contains any non-whitespace characters.  Header fields
   that are otherwise relevant but contain only whitespace are ignored
   and treated as if they were not present.

   Note that steps 1 and 2 above extract the Resent-Sender or Resent-
   From header from the first resent block (as defined by section 3.6.6
   of [RFC 2822]) if any.  Steps 3 and 4 above extract the Sender or From
   header if there are no resent blocks.

   Note that what constitutes a hopelessly malformed header or a
   hopelessly malformed mailbox in step 5 above is a matter for local
   policy.  Such local policy will never cause two implementations to
   return different PRAs.  However, it may cause one implementation to
   return a PRA where another implementation does not.  This will occur
   only when dealing with a message containing headers of questionable
   legality.

   Although the algorithm specifies how messages that are not in strict
   conformance with the provisions of RFC 2822 should be treated for the
   purposes of determining the PRA, this should not be taken as
   requiring or recommending that any systems accept such messages when
   they otherwise would not have done so.  However, if a liberal
   implementation accepts such messages and desires to know their PRAs,
   it MUST use the algorithm specified here.

   Where messages conform to RFC 822 rather than RFC 2822, it is
   possible for the algorithm to give unexpected results.  An RFC 822
   message should not normally contain more than one set of resent
   headers; however, the placement of those headers is not specified,
   nor are they required to be contiguous.  It is therefore possible
   that the Resent-From header will be selected even though a Resent-
   Sender header is present.  Such cases are expected to be rare or
   non-existent in practice.



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3.  Security Considerations

   The PRA, as described by this document, is extracted from message
   headers that have historically not been verified.  Thus, anyone using
   the PRA for any purpose MUST be aware that the headers from which it
   is derived might be fraudulent, malicious, malformed, and/or
   incorrect.  [RFC 4406] describes one mechanism for validating the PRA.

   A message's PRA will often be extracted from a header field that is
   not normally displayed by existing mail user agent software.  If the
   PRA is used as part of a mechanism to authenticate the message's
   origin, the message SHOULD NOT be displayed with an indication of its
   authenticity (positive or negative) without the PRA header field also
   being displayed.

4.  Acknowledgements

   The PRA concept was first published in [CallerID].  It has been
   refined using valuable suggestions from members of the MARID working
   group.

5.  References

5.1.  Normative References

   [RFC 2119]   Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
               Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC 2822]   Resnick, P., "Internet Message Format", RFC 2822, April
               2001.

5.2.  Informative References

   [CallerID]  Microsoft Corporation, Caller ID for E-Mail Technical
               Specification,
               http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/safety/technologies/
               senderid/resources.mspx

   [RFC 4406]   Lyon, J. and M. Wong, "Sender ID: Authenticating E-Mail",
               RFC 4406, April 2006.











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Author's Address

   Jim Lyon
   Microsoft Corporation
   One Microsoft Way
   Redmond, WA 98052
   USA

   EMail: jimlyon@microsoft.com










































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Full Copyright Statement

   Copyright © The Internet Society (2006).

   This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
   contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
   retain all their rights.

   This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
   "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
   OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET
   ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
   INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE
   INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
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Acknowledgement

   Funding for the RFC Editor function is provided by the IETF
   Administrative Support Activity (IASA).







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Purported Responsible Address in E-Mail Messages

RFC TOTAL SIZE: 14387 bytes
PUBLICATION DATE: Monday, April 24th, 2006
LEGAL RIGHTS: The IETF Trust (see BCP 78)