[st_goliath]

> "I don't want to" is not a valid excuse

for the client. If you're implementing a server, "the client SHOULD but didn't" isn't a valid excuse to reject a client either.

You can do it anyway, you might even have good reasons for it, but then you sure don't get to point at the RFC and call the client broken.

[geocar]

> isn't a valid excuse to reject a client either.

Yes it absolutely is: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119 is quite clear.

    3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
       may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
       particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
       carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

If the client SHOULD do something and doesn't, and your server does not know why, you SHOULD disconnect and move on.

If the server has considered fully the implications of not having a Message-ID header, then it MAY continue processing.

In general, you will find most of the Internet specifications are labelled MUST if they are required for the protocol's own state-processing (i.e. as documented), while specifications are labelled SHOULD if they are required for application state-processing in some circumstances (i.e. other users of the protocol).

[Dylan16807]

> If the client SHOULD do something and doesn't, and your server does not know why, you SHOULD disconnect and move on.

That is not a rule.

In this situation the server can reject any message if it wants to, and not doing a SHOULD tests the server's patience, but it's still ultimately in the "server wanted to" category, not the "RFC was violated" category.

[drecked]

That clearly means it’s not required.

How does Google know whether or not the sender has a valid reason? They cannot know that so for them to reject an email for it means they would reject emails that have valid reasons as well.

[buran77]

> If the server has considered fully the implications

The server "considers" nothing. The considerations are for the human implementers to make when building their software. And they can never presume to know why the software on the other side is working a certain way. Only that the RFC didn't make something mandatory.

The rejection isn't to be compliant with the RFC, it's a choice made by the server implementers.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Either the server must explicitly confirm to servers or the clients must accept everything. Otherwise message delivery is not guaranteed. In the context of an email protocol, this often is a silent failure which causes real-world problems.

I don’t care what the protocol rfc says, the client arbitrarily rejecting an email from the server for some missing unimportant header (for deduction detection?) is silly.

[Veserv]

You are describing MAY.

“MAY This word, or the adjective "OPTIONAL", mean that an item is truly optional… An implementation which does not include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option MUST be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does not include the option (except, of course, for the feature the option provides.)”

Note how it explicitly calls out interoperation with implementations that do or do not implement MAY. As a exception that proves the rule, we can reasonably assume that not interoperating with a system ignoring a SHOULD rule is a correct implementation and it is the fault of whoever is not implementing SHOULD.

[Arnt]

Hearsay has it that the reason is spam. Spam messages are said to have massively higher chances of minor RFC violations when they arrive at the destination server.

[shadowgovt]

Most of the time, in my experience, when one encounters a situation like this in Internet tech (i.e. "why is this suggestion treated like a hard requirement?"), this is the answer: "because attackers found a way to exploit the lack of the suggestion's implementation in the wild, so it is now a hard requirement."

The standards, to my observation, tend to lag the CVEs.

Side-note: If someone has built a reverse-database that annotates RFCs with overriding CVEs that have invalidated or rendered harmful part of the spec, I'd love to put that in my toolbox. It'd be nice-to-have in the extreme if it hasn't been created yet.