Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!news.cs.indiana.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!midway!clout!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: Is '@' ever needed?
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1991 17:30:35 GMT
Message-ID: <1991Jun18.173035.26682@chinet.chi.il.us>
Keywords: '%'
References: <797@minya.UUCP>
Lines: 25

In article <797@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
>This may sound silly, but I  recently  realized,  and  testing  on  an
>assortment  of machines has so far verified, that there seems to be no
>reason to ever use '@' in a mail address.   If  you  always  use  '%',
>mailers  that  I've tested all seem to accept it and convert it to '@'
>when necessary.  I'm wondering if this really works everywhere.

It doesn't work with stock AT&T sysV (pre-r4) mail, but then @'s don't
either.  Since % started life as an undocumented hack to work around
mailers that don't believe there is intelligent life beyond their own
network it's probably not a good idea to use it for general purpose
routing.  Its value of letting a remote address pretend to be a local
part until it reaches a gateway machine will be destroyed if everyone
starts recognizing it as a routing character and confusing its
precedence with the other operators.

>"Well,  of course, no self-respecting hacker (oops, I mean
>professional software engineer ;-) would ever  consider  something  so
>obvious  as  using a comma as a list separator

I would have used "machine1->machine2->user", but nobody asked me...

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us