Xref: utzoo comp.misc:3189 comp.std.misc:56 comp.mail.misc:1204
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!polya!cayuga!andy
From: andy@cayuga.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.std.misc,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Standardizing Email?
Message-ID: <3714@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 24 Aug 88 06:25:33 GMT
References: <788@vsi.UUCP> <79700010@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <304@pvab.UUCP> <26196@think.UUCP>
Sender: news@polya.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: andy@cayuga.Stanford.EDU (Andy Freeman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 31

In article <26196@think.UUCP> barmar@kulla.think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>In article <304@pvab.UUCP> robert@pvab.UUCP (Robert Claeson) writes:
>>What does an X.400 address look like?
>
>If you're asking what the equivalent to user@domain and
>host!host!...!user is, there isn't really such a thing, since X.400 is
>not a textual protocol.  Both messages and the the message-transfer
>protocol are binary, based on structured objects.

>		but this form of ambiguity is not possible in
>X.400 because there is no parsing involved (except, perhaps, by the
>user application used to create mail, but that's not the problem of
>the mail transfer protocol).

I sure hope this doesn't mean that x.400 doesn't define a canonical
textual representation of addresses.  I rarely use a mail system to
give addresses to other people and quite often, I don't even use a
computer.  If x.400 addresses don't have a standard text format,
they're useless for business cards, phone conversations, magazine
articles, etc., and they require special handling for databases.

Maybe it is time to extend 822; the conforming implementations work
and its problems with non-conforming implemenations are no worse than
X.400's will be.  (Even if there's a PD X.400 implementation, there
are a lot of people who won't run it even if you cut them off if they
don't.)

-andy
UUCP:  {arpa gateways, decwrl, uunet, rutgers}!polya.stanford.edu!andy
ARPA:  andy@polya.stanford.edu
(415) 329-1718/723-3088 home/cubicle