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From: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Wanted: Messed-Up Mail Headers
Message-ID: <28292@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 27 Sep 90 23:04:00 GMT
References: <63881@bu.edu.bu.edu> <3301@decuac.DEC.COM> <7154@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <1990Sep22.174312.29336@ibmpcug.co.uk> <2016@argus.UUCP>
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Reply-To: jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck)
Lines: 22

In article <2016@argus.UUCP>, ken@argus.UUCP (Kenneth Ng) writes:
[ "Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send."]

> Unfortunately I've seen this phrase abused by both the sender and the
> receiver implementers.  The sender says the receiver should be more 
> liberal in what they accept.  And the receiver says the sender should
> be more conservative in what they send.  Either that or they say 
> "It's not a bug, its a FEE_TURE (as in fee_cees)."

Kenneth, this is an easy one to solve.  You should be liberal because
people sometimes screw up, but in a case like the above, either the
address is standard (so the receiver is in error) or the address is
non-standard (so the sender is in error).

But people who have to use the system don't care who's guilty; they
just want it to work.  This is why the receiver shouldn't be pedantic
about rejecting things that commonly appear for historical reasons
(i.e. they were allowed in the previous (maybe ad-hoc) standard).

--
Joe Buck
jbuck@galileo.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!galileo.berkeley.edu!jbuck