[Mimedefang] crappy message format standards (the RFCs suck)

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Friday, March 27, 2009 4:17 PM -0400 Dave O'Neill 
<dmo at roaringpenguin.com> wrote:

> As seen at YAPC::NA::2008, "Email Hates the Living":
>
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7054401183589794595
>
> It's a good overview of how broken the RFCs are, with an extra helping
> of zombie humour on top.  Worth a look if you have an hour to spare,
> though some of the slides are a bit blurry.

Amusing and depressing. Definitely worth watching.

So is there no hope? It seems like all the calls for a "new SMTP" to combat 
spam are pointless if the underlying message format is so badly 
underspecified. (I've never bought the call for SMTP fixes anyway. I've 
always felt the problem was in sloppy acceptance of standards violations, 
and now I learn that it's impossible to do otherwise.)

Is it feasible to write a new message standard to replace 2822, with all 
MUSTS, and something like HTML's doctype strict to declare that the message 
either meets the standard or is rejectable?