I’m doing some work with an email company at the moment. The company has been in the email space for decades. Holy moly email is just full of stuff like this. There is an insane amount of institutional knowledge about how email actually works - not what the specs say but what email servers need to actually do to process real emails and deal with real email clients and servers.

The rfcs try to keep up, but they’re missing a lot of details and all important context for why recommendations are as they are, and what you actually need to do to actually process real email you see in the wild. (And talk to the long tail of email software).

This conversation makes me think about cornering some of the engineers with a microphone. It’d be great to talk through the specs with them, to capture some of that missing commentary.