Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!burl!codas!uflorida!beach.cis.ufl.edu!esj From: esj@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Eric S. Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Dots in a user name. Message-ID: <10468@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> Date: 31 Jan 88 21:28:28 GMT References: <1133@jenny.cl.cam.ac.uk> Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU Reply-To: esj@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Eric S. Johnson) Organization: UF CIS Department Lines: 36 In article <1133@jenny.cl.cam.ac.uk> scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) writes: >[Please excuse this somewhat niave question ... ] > >In a recent message in another news group, Greg Woods >decried the use of "user" names that in contain the character ".". In >a mail conversation I pointed out that RFC822 specifically allows them >to which he replied that they would cause indigestion to lots of mailers >in the real world. > >Is he correct? What mailers don't like dots in the user name? > The prototype sendmail.cf that I used as a base for all of ours came from Berkeley. In ruleset 3 it would rewrite x.y as x<@y> (the cannonical form). I.E. x.y was treated like x@y. This was due to some older (pre 822) local Berkeleyism. This would not bother RFC822 addresses, which were dealt with on earlier lines, but did cause problems with RFC976 addresses. Due to the order that the rules would apply, any address like host.domain.toplevel!user would get mangled to look like domain.toplevel!user@host. I took out the offending line. Newer proto sendmail.cf files that I have seen dont have this problem. I don't think the one that came with 4.3BSD had this problem. But some mailers out there may still have that problem. This could also cause trouble for local mail to a user with a dot in their username. -- In Real Life: UUCP: ...ihnp4!codas!ufcsv!beach.cis.ufl.edu!esj Eric S. Johnson II Internet: esj@beach.cis.ufl.edu University of Florida "Your species is always dying and suffering" -Q