roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (02/20/86)
[Note: followup to net.mail] There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether case should be significant in host names. I remember some flack recently about "glacier" vs. "Glacier" vs. "GLACIER", with nominally rational arguments being made on all sides. Anyway, I ran across the following in nj.general and happened to notice the strange capitalization of the domain names (look carefully at the From: and Message-ID: lines). This seems like somebody went out of their way to see how far they could bend the rules before they broke. It's one thing to be flexible in the specifications so we can talk to (for example) people on BITNET with upper-case only terminals, but why push the issue for no good reason? At the very least, I would think having your domain name written the same way every time it appeared in one message would be a good idea. > Path: phri!allegra!alice!ark > From: ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) > Newsgroups: nj.general > Subject: Re: AT&T in the copier business(?) > Message-ID: <4994@alice.uUCp> > Date: 19 Feb 86 04:00:15 GMT -- Roy Smith, {allegra,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (02/23/86)
> ...I ran across the following in nj.general and happened to notice the > strange capitalization of the domain names... > > ...At the very least, I would think having your domain name written the > same way every time it appeared in one message would be a good idea. > > > From: ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) > > Message-ID: <4994@alice.uUCp> The "From:" line is used, under some circumstances, to provide an address to reply to. The "Message-ID:", however, is used ONLY to provide a unique ID to a message. <4994@alice.NetNewsTurd> would be equally good, providing theer was no other machine on USENET advertising itself as "alice.NetNewsTurd". According to RFC822, case is ignored in the "domain" part of a mail address anyway. I think Peter Honeyman's explanation is the most likely. (BTL research has shown amusing bits of disrespect for various other mail conventions; a message from Dennis Ritchie with a full complement of header lines is quite entertaining.) -- Guy Harris {ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy guy@sun.arpa (yes, really)