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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!sri-spam!rutgers!uwvax!oddjob!hao!woods
From: woods@hao.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.arch,sci.math,sci.math.stat,sci.physics,sci.astro,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.fortran,comp.lsi,sci.math.symbolic
Subject: Re: comp.numeric deferred; try Stanford NA list
Message-ID: <1138@hao.ucar.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 88 18:40:31 GMT
References: <40114@sun.uucp> <1116@hao.ucar.edu> <959@luth.luth.se>
Reply-To: woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods)
Organization: High Altitude Obs./NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 19

In article <959@luth.luth.se> sow@cad.luth.se (Sven-Ove Westberg) writes:
>READ RFC822 Page 27. !!!!
>
>Periods is allowed in the local-part in RFC822, period.

   Sorry to repost on this, but I'm getting inundated with mail telling me
that periods are legal in the user part of the address according to the
standard (RFC-822). I *KNOW* that. I said the address was "hideous",
not "invalid". Sorry for the confusion. My point is that there are mailers
out there that will choke on a multiple-token user part of the address.
That these mailers are not standard-conforming is true but irrelevant.
What is important is 1) how many of them are there, and 2) what is the
probability of them getting fixed? The answers would seem to be 1) no one
really knows, and 2) next to nil. 
  All I can say about is is that if *I* were running a mailing list, I
wouldn't have multiple-token user parts of addresses. That's all. It
is up to the mailing list maintainer to decide if he wants to worry
about this or not.

--Greg