Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Use of % in addresses?
Summary: Apparently % is the way to go, and @a:@b:u@c is going to die...
Message-ID: <1142@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 89 13:49:49 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 29

In article <10800001@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu> funk@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu writes:

    In our implementation of email (over DDN), we often see sites that use
    addresses in the form  user%subsite@host.subdomain.domain.  The use of the
    % notation has been variously described as being part of RFC 822, RFC 733,
    or JNT.  I've read 822/733, and while they will accept that as part of the
    user portion of an address, I don't see that they define anything about that.

I remember having read some posting from an Internet guy saying that in
the future the @ form for "routing" is going to be deprecated, and that
the % form will become the official one. Apparently this is because the
Internet powers have realized that % is very common, while @a:u@b is very
rarely used, and so a bit of realpolitik comes about... (also, the %
form is slightly easier to parse by machine).

In particular, end users find it much easier to write "routes" (and please
do not object that domainized routes are never necessary, at least at the
user level -- this is wishful thinking in the presence of sysadms that do
not update tables, networks that are not registered, etc...) with % rather
than @. Let me please repeat the old whine that the UUCP ! form could have
been adopted throughout, and we would all have been spared a lot of misery.

As to the origin of %, I suspect it is either Berkeley or CSnet; surely the
latter did a lot to make it common, especially when ARPA was the Internet
and everybody else had to pass thru the relay at udel.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk