Lotus Domino and RFC

In a recent request by a government customer we were asked about the compliance of Domino with various RFC. I've listed them here for reference:

RFC	Description	Domino	Remarks
RFC 1123	Requirements for Internet Hosts Application and Support (STD 3)	Yes
RFC 1870	SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration (obsoletes: RFC 1653)	Yes
RFC 2476	Message Submission Obsolete		see RFC 4409 below.
RFC 2505	AntiSpam Recommendations for SMTP MTAs (BCP 30)	Yes
RFC 5321	The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (obsoletes RFC 821 aka STD 10, RFC 974, and RFC 1869, RFC 2821)	Yes
RFC 5322	Internet Message Format (obsoletes RFC 822 aka STD 11, and RFC 822)	Yes
RFC 2920	SMTP Service Extension for Command Pipelining (STD 60)	Yes
RFC 3030	SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME Messages	No
RFC 3207	SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security (obsoletes RFC 2487)	Yes
RFC 3461	SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status Notifications (obsoletes RFC 1891)	Yes
RFC 3462	The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail System Administrative Messages (obsoletes RFC 1892)	Yes
RFC 3463	Enhanced Status Codes for SMTP (obsoletes RFC 1893 )	Yes
RFC 3464	An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications (obsoletes RFC 1894)	Yes
RFC 3834	Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail	Yes
RFC 4409	Message Submission for Mail (obsoletes RFC 2476)	Partial	Domino can be configured to act as an MSA, but is not strictly compliant (e.g. does not qualify unqualified domains in addresses)
RFC 4952	Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email		This is not a standard - only an informational document
RFC 4954	SMTP Service Extension for Authentication (obsoletes RFC 2554)	Yes
RFC 5068	Email Submission Operations: Access and Accountability Requirements (BCP 134)	Yes	This is not a standard - it is a document describing a set of operational best practices. Domino can be configured to support these practices

Posted by Stephan H Wissel on 13 April 2009 | Comments (5) | categories: Show-N-Tell Thursday

posted by Dave Harris on Tuesday 14 April 2009 AD:
Stephan,

How do others compare (Exchange, SendMail, qmail, etc)?

posted by Stephan H. Wissel on Wednesday 15 April 2009 AD:
@Dave: You have to ask the others. We don't track their compliance to RFCs.
Emoticon biggrin.gif

stw

posted by Claus Allweil on Thursday 16 April 2009 AD:
Hi Stephan,
thanks for publishing. Perfect listing, I will reuse that.

Claus

posted by Christoph on Thursday 14 April 2016 AD:
Lotus Notes is not RFC 5322 compliant!!
In the RFC 5322 Standard the field From has a different purpose than in Lotus Notes, because it is always identifying the owner of the mail.box. Instead of using the field Principal to identify the owner of the mail.box in which an email was written, the field Sender is used to identify the effective user who produced the email.
The field Principal is not (or better said no longer) accepted in the email header by many email providers and bounced back referring to being not RFC 5322 compliant. In messages produced by LotusScript directly in a document saved in the mail.box, you should use the field From instead of the field Principal and add the field Sender for the email address of the effective sender (sent by), who in a regular Lotus Email would be in the field From. If you prefer to have all replies to the effective sender instead of the person identified in the field From (original LN field Principal), you need to add the field ReplyTo with the same address as in der field Sender.
Emoticon cry.gif

posted by tstock00 on Thursday 10 October 2019 AD:

Thank-you Christoph! You've saved me days of going through the head-ache of trying to figure out why calendar invites were suddenly getting blocked by GMail and trapped in Quarantine by one of our clients. The Notes support team was pointing at our DNS configuration but didn't make sense to us. I was this close to dropping Notes calendaring altogether! Once I stripped out the Principal field and changed the Sender field, it worked perfectly :-)