kre@ucbvax.ARPA (Robert Elz) (08/03/85)
This is the first of a series of 4 articles on the topic of mail addressing. I have broken this article into 4 parts to avoid subjecting people to one monstrous long article (each of the parts is likely to be quite long enough..) This article is a general introduction, with very little, if any, content. The following 3 articles will address semantics of mail addresses, syntax of mail addresses, and questions of routing - in that order. Please try and read the articles this way, even if they should happen to arrive at your site in some other order. (Yes, I know its a little late if you have already read the others). Also, please read all 4 before replying to any, and then if you followup, please followup to the article that concerns your followup - these are four separate issues, not all readers are interested in all of them (most people probably aren't interested in any) - lets try and keep the issues separated, and clearly defined. These articles will refer to many others posted in the past few days. I am not going to include quotes, instead I will paraphrase as necessary, and include the article id's of the articles in question (all the civilized news reading programs provide an easy mechanism for you to refer to the referenced article if you want to check the accuracy of my summaries of other's statements). Eg: in <3054@nsc.UUCP> Chuq Von Rospach claims that his original question wasn't intended to start a "religious discussion". In <552@down.FUN> Peter Honeyman says that these are not religious issues. I must say that I agree with Peter. But Chuq is also right - some people treat this topic as a religious matter - my hope is that these articles will bring some sanity to the discussion, and point up the real questions to be asked and answered. However, this discussion was really started by the slightly earlier article from Fred Avolio <568@decuac.UUCP> entitled "Name space explosion -- first tremors". At least that's the problem that I am most concerned with. Perhaps I will come back to Chuq's original question (from <3018@nsc.UUCP>, entitled "Mail routing -- problems showing up") in a later article, it really was somewhat more mundane. Robert Elz ucbvax!kre kre@monet.berkeley.edu