Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wang!fitz From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Mail addresses and RFC1123 Message-ID: Date: 27 Jul 90 22:20:38 GMT Expires: 8/3/90 References: <9007242101.AA32438@cs.niu.edu> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 38 enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes: > I was there when RFC1123 was written. I had my own misgivings about > the language and use of parentheses with respect to the "routig > operators". However, Bob Braden (the editor) told me what he had in > mind, and I saw that it was good. May I ask why? It causes problems for UUCP sites, and basically forces us to rewrite the local parts of nonlocal addresses (turning a%b into b!a) in order to get stuff delivered. (We don't do the rewriting here, so we suffer with a fair amount of undeliverable mail). > The Internet is not, as I > have had to point out to several people, a conglomeration of networks > and standards of all sorts, it's one particular technology with one > particular standard protocol suite. SMTP and RFC822 in this case. It > has been a tremendous success, and other people try to mimick the > Internet as best they can. One of the reasons it has been so enormously successful is its ability to encompass other networks into it. When two networks merge, the users adopt the conventions of the more flexible net, and the less flexible net becomes a special case. So far, the Internet (especially the DNS) has blown everyone away with its distributed naming authority and open- ended mail addressing. This kind of thing, which makes the Internet more rigid, and less able to engulf the conventions of other nets, damages some of the things that made the Internet (especially RFC 822) so successful in the first place. > If you would like, I can send you parts of the discussion relating to > source routing and the emerging consensus on the "%-hack". I don't care about source routing, but I'd be interested to see the discussion on the % hack. Could you post it? --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz