RFC 822
More info
- Creator
- David H. Crocker
- Released
- 1982
- Type
- Standard
- Spec
- RFC 822
- Successor
- RFC 2822, RFC 5322
The 1982 standard that decided what an email looks like: header lines, a blank line, then the text — and still holds in every essential respect.
David Crocker at the University of Delaware wrote "Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages" in August 1982, the same month SMTP got its RFC 821. It replaced 1977's RFC 733 and fixed the Name: value form for headers such as From, To, Subject, Date and Message-ID, separated from the body by an empty line.
The format was useful enough that Usenet borrowed it wholesale in RFC 1036. Its limitation was that everything had to be seven-bit ASCII — which MIME had to fix ten years later by wrapping attachments in text. It was revised as RFC 2822 (2001) and RFC 5322 (2008), but a message written in 1982 still reads fine in today's clients.