Message:
Marks end of headers sendmail
The Message:
header
is used to mark an early end to a mail message’s
headers. When sendmail finds
this header, it immediately stops gathering the
message’s header lines and treats the rest of the
header as the start of the message body. This header
is useful for including non-Internet headers in the
header portion of a mail message. For
example:
To: george@wash.dc.gov (George Washington) Subject: Re: More text Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 17:32:45 EDT Message-Id: <200105061723.f46NIY7f028392@wash.dc.gov> Received: by wash.dc.gov (4.1/1.12 $) id AA01513; Sun, 6 May 2001 17:32:45 EDT From: Ben Franklin <ben@philly.dc.gov> Message: ROUTED BY BITNET/CO=US/ROUTE=INTERNET/ FORMAT OF MESSAGE /LANG=USENGLISH/FORM=PLAINTEXT/
Here, the last two header lines are non-Internet
headers that might confuse some programs. But the
Message:
header
that precedes them tells
sendmail to treat them as
message body, and problems are avoided.
Note that Message:
is not defined by any RFC but is a convention that
is shared by all versions of
sendmail and a few other
MTAs. It is included in
sendmail for backward
compatibility with a few old messaging systems, so
it should be considered deprecated. The Message:
header should
never be declared in the configuration file, and
should probably never be used.
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