| Platform SDK: CDO for Windows 2000 |
The RFC 822 specification defines a standard format for electronic messages, which consists of a set of header fields and an optional body. The headers contain information about the message, such as to whom it is being sent, from whom it is being sent, when it was sent, the subject, and so on. The body, if present, is separated from the header fields by an empty line (\r\n). The following is an example of a simple message in this format:
From: someone@microsoft.com To: someone_else@microsoft.com Subject: As basic as it gets This is the plain text body of the message. Note the blank line between the header information and the body of the message.
Both the headers and the optional body must consist only of US-ASCII characters. Each header consists of a name and a value that is separated by a colon character. The header name must consist of printable US-ASCII characters. The header value can span one or two lines (folded or unfolded) and is terminated by a carriage return and line feed sequence followed by a non-white space character.
The RFC 822 format is the basis for many other more specific message formats. The following example is a message in USENET article (or message) format specified by RFC 850, which is based on RFC 822:
From: someone@microsoft.com Subject: As basic as it gets Newsgroups: comp.microsoft.test This is the plain text body of the message. Note the blank line between the header information and the body of the message.
For more information on the RFC 822 specification, see Internet Messages and SMTP, and Summary of RFC 822.