Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!dheller From: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller) Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush Subject: Re: mush adding commas to addresses Keywords: mush, commas, bug city Message-ID: <14033@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 21 May 89 18:10:20 GMT References: <39@mondo.omni.com> <14024@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Heller) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 33 I think I made an error in this statement: > some general info: > RFC822 requires using commas between addresses so as to identify them > from other addresses. I am probably wrong about RFC822 because it might not say anything about multiple addresses on the same line. I'm at home now, so I can't check my RFC which is at work :-) However, it is certainly accepted protocol to separate addresses with commas -- sendmail requires it as well as many other RFC-compliant MTAs. The reason for this is that addresses can have multiple words in it: island!argv (Dan Heller) @ sun.com and it is all considered one address. If there is another address following it, how is any parser going to determine the end of one address and the beginning of another. Therefore, the delimeter to separate addresses can't be spaces. Commas are used. This interferes with a valid addressing scheme that Bart and I call "weird" addresses because altho they are legal, they are inconvenient because they contain commas. e.g. a legal address might look like: @host.dom.ain,@cad.berkeley.edu:argv@island.uucp Here, the hostnames are separated by commas, but if you try to use this address in any mail user agent, then it will probably break because the commas are the address delimeters. Sometimes, mush parses a folder that has this style of address in the From_ line (check any mail that comes out of toranto :-). Mush knows that there is one and only one address in the From_ line, so it knows how to parse that address correctly. What it does is convert it to a more reasonable type of address (@-format, unless you've configured mush with UUCP defined). Dan Heller