APPENDIX B. SIMPLE FIELD PARSING

Some mail-reading software systems may wish to perform only minimal processing, ignoring the internal syntax of structured field-bodies and treating them the same as unstructured-field-bodies. Such software will need only to distinguish:

• Header fields from the message body,

• Beginnings of fields from lines which continue fields,

• Field-names from field-contents.

The abbreviated set of syntactic rules which follows will suffice for this purpose. It describes a limited view of messages and is a subset of the syntactic rules provided in the main part of this specification. One small exception is that the contents of field-bodies consist only of text:

• B.1. SYNTAX
• B.2. SEMANTICS