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From: pdb@sei.cmu.edu (Patrick Barron)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Precedence in network mail addresses
Message-ID: <1349@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: Sun, 17-May-87 03:25:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: aw.1349
Posted: Sun May 17 03:25:56 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 17-May-87 11:41:33 EDT
References: <588@bsu-cs.UUCP> <958@xanth.UUCP> <559@smidefix.liu.se> <631@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Sender: netnews@sei.cmu.edu
Reply-To: pdb@sei.cmu.edu.UUCP (Pat Barron)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, SEI, Pgh, Pa
Lines: 26

In article <631@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>Thus I should be able to say "[a$b&c!d#f]@host.DOMAIN", and let "host"
>handle the decoding of the "[a$b&c!d]" and hand the message on to the
>server for the network that uses the addres format "a$b&c!d#f".  No
>other node has any business trying to interpret "a$b&c!d#f", or
>insisting on converting it (usually incorrectly) to "b.c.d.f.a" or
>whatever, just because it wants everything to be separated by dots or
>percent signs.  Leave the interpretation of local syntax to the local
>sites!

In an Internet environment (that is, one that uses RFC 822 type addressing),
this should already work (with a few exceptions like explicitly routed
addresses and comment conventions).  At the mail transport level, there is
only ONE operator:  the '@' sign.  Precedence is no problem, since only
one '@' sign allowed in an address.  Once the message arrives at the
site specified on the right side of the '@', that site can interpret the
left side however it wants to.  No intermediary gateway should even ATTEMPT
to interpret the left side.  Now, you may have a problem if you want to
put another '@' sign on the left side of the address, but RFC 822 has
provisions for escaping "special" characters.

So, sites that are really RFC 822 compliant should already be able to do
what you want, with no new grouping operators needed.  Or am I missing the
point entirely?

--Pat.