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Path: utzoo!linus!gatech!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Mail addressing and routing
Message-ID: <1468@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Sep-85 00:54:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.1468
Posted: Wed Sep 11 00:54:32 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Sep-85 22:10:18 EDT
References: <644@adobe.UUCP> <734@vortex.UUCP> <1156@umcp-cs.UUCP> <263@ncr-sd.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 55

In article <278@ncr-sd.UUCP> greg@ncr-sd.UUCP (Greg Noel) writes:
>In article <1451@cbosgd.UUCP> mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) writes:
>>We looked at the possibility of doing the ihnp4/post style thing as
>>part of a standard.  (Basically, mail to ihnp4!mark.r.horton works,
>>as will as ihnp4!gjm, the former is a person name, the latter a host.)
>>There was one killer problem: what do you do with ihnp4!horton?  Is
>>it a login name or a surname?  What if it's both?  How do you decide
>>this syntactically, given the layering of a real system?
>
>I assume that gjm is a login id, not a host.  Or maybe you went to a
>party where Gary was a host???

Yes, I meant login-id.  I noticed the typo shortly after it was too
late to fix.  Sorry, Gary.

>Anyway, the heuristic used by ihnp4's code seems to be that if a name
>has a dot in it, it is syntatctically a person-name to be resolved.  I
>suspect that if I sent mail to ihnp4!horton it would tell me that "horton"
>was not a known user (although that may be a bad example -- how about
>ihnp4!bourne?).  I suppose the question is how many systems use login
>names (mail identifiers) that routinely include periods (or underscores,
>or some separator we can agree on).  Somehow,
>>	ihnp4!/pn=Horton_Mark_R
>or even
>	/pn=mark.horton@ihnp4	(is that slash required?)
>isn't as aesthetic as
>	mark.horton@ihnp4
>although this may be a case where only the mail transfer agent has to
>deal with such strangenesses and the user agents can hide the uglyness.
>

The X.400 standard allows you to send to an address with the following
semantics: "the guy in XYZ Inc whose surname is Horton" (the syntax is
all binary so I can't type it here, besides I don't have it memorized.)
Using dots, there is no way to generate this, e.g. ihnp4!horton would
be how it's done, but that's ambiguous.  A trailing dot causes lots of
problems, especially typographical ambiguity ``send it to "ihnp4!horton."''
and human factors/error handling considerations.  Also, the ihnp4 scheme
doesn't handle generational qualifiers such as "Jr" or "III".  When you
add them, you get a result that makes it impossible to pick out which
word is the surname (at least, I can't figure out how to do it.)  While
I really do like the ihnp4 syntax, I can't see how to generalize it to
handle full X.400 semantics.  The proposals aren't as pretty, but they work.

>>which is a special case of a more general MHS X.400 address. ....
>
>I've heard about X.400, but I'm afraid I don't know much about it.  Is
>there a copy that I can get easily?  Even an ARPAnet copy would be OK;
>I think I might be able to get my ARPAnet relay to FTP it for me.

I'm told there is no machine readable copy (Xerox has an out of date
one, there are lots of fonts and tables.)  You should be able to order
a copy from OMNICOM (for a significant charge) at 703-281-1135.

	Mark