gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (04/18/85)
Rich Wales (wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA or {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales) says:
> Colons create all kinds of problems in ARPA-land:
> (1) The colon has special meaning in ARPANET addresses under RFC822, in
> connection with the "source-route" or "audit-trail" notation (such
> as "<@MIT-MC:FRED@MIT-OZ>".
> (3) Another reason quotes may not help with addresses containing colons
> is that several mail systems queue up each outgoing ARPANET message
> with a "control" line at the beginning of the message, specifying
> the destination host and other parameters; these parameters are sep-
> arated on the control line by -- you guessed it -- colons.
Neither of these should cause problems unless the colon is in the
HOST NAME part of an Internet address, which is illegal. As long as
they're in the "local-part" (after the route-addrs e.g. @MIT-MC: and
before the host name e.g. @MIT-OZ) they are fine. The colon in the
route-addr always matches a leading @-sign, so if no leading @-sign is
there, any colon is part of the local-part.
> If you are responsible for an environment which uses the colon as a
> site-user delimiter in addresses, PLEASE give some consideration to the
> possibility of using something else which will be more compatible with
> RFC822.
RFC922 is not the problem here; the problem is Arpanet hosts that
don't implement RFC822 (eg broken quoting, not accepting : in local-part).
If you are responsible for an Arpanet environment which uses the colon
as a delimiter in mail delivery subsystems, PLEASE give some
consideration to the possibility of using something else which will be
more compatible with RFC822. Thank you.