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From: brad@looking.UUCP
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Status of Canadian domain
Message-ID: <917@looking.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 00:10:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: looking.917
Posted: Sun Aug 23 00:10:34 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 14:53:01 EDT
References: <8708190102.AA05431@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <298@ncrcan.UUCP> <8708211151.AA16007@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> <54@ncc.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Distribution: can
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 36

The scheme the NIC people selected is brain dead.  But it's hard to change
now.

There is nothing wrong with having multiple logical addressing schemes.
There should be such.

But one consistent scheme must always be present.  That's the scheme you
use when you try and "figure out" how to mail somebody.

If you wanted to get mail to somebody, what would be easiest to work out?
I maintain that this is the geographical scheme.  Usually if you know one
thing about somebody, it's the town they live in.  You need this if you want
to mail a postal letter, or find their phone number.  Even if you already
know the number, the town is coded within it.

This has nothing to do with the routing underneath.  This is just how
I think we usually associate people.

Sometimes you think of people as belonging to orgnanizations.  "That's
John from Mitel" you might say.  But you also probably know that Mitel's
main computer is in Ottawa.

The one, consistent scheme that everybody understands is geography.
Organizational and company related schemes are haphazard and difficult to
follow.

For far down the line, a geographical domain structure is the only way to
go.  Now, while the number of email users is small, we can use other schemes
as we like, but they will damn us later.

Think about it:  If you could redisign the Canada Post addressing scheme
right now (ignoring Postal Codes), and things like routing and post offices
were not a problem, how would you do it?  This is how email should be addressed,
too.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473