wales@ucla-cs.UUCP (08/23/84)
In reply to Greg Couch's message: > The solution we implemented was to use the colon as the local delimitor, > since it historically has been for local networks (e.g. berknet) and > uucp sites (ucbvax) don't mung it. Thus a local net address would be > <ucsfcgl!ucsfbcl:gregc@Berkeley.Arpa> for ArpaNet sites, and > <ucbvax!ucsfcgl!ucsfbcl:gregc> for uucp sites. If we were directly on > the ArpaNet, then <ucsfbcl:gregc@uscfcgl.Arpa> would work too. Unfortunately, Greg, colons present serious problems for ARPANET addresses. RFC822 -- the current ARPANET mail format standard -- assigns special syn- tactic functions to the colon (it is used when specifying a "source route" address, for example). Hence, your sample ARPANET address would require double quotes around the local part -- something like: Greg Couch <"ucsfcgl!ucsfbcl:gregc"@BERKELEY> or else it would be illegal. Even if you were to do this, I'm not 100% certain that all ARPANET hosts' mail systems properly handle quoted ad- dresses (even though they should, of course -- please, no flames saying that people should flood the net with quoted addresses in order to force everyone to handle them properly!); you could scream at such sites till they fixed their software, but in the meantime the mail would not be getting through. The fact that the colon was traditionally used for Berknet addresses really won't help you in the face of all those ARPANET hosts who will insist that you defer to RFC822. Even Berkeley, I understand, no longer uses colons in addresses (at least, if they do, they reformat addresses to conform to RFC822 before sending them to the world). Perhaps the people who formulated RFC822 should have anticipated this particular problem, and avoided the colon -- but it's too late to do anything about that now, and so if you plan on sending or receiving any mail via the ARPANET, you'd probably be best advised to use an address which will pass RFC822 specs without quoting. I would suggest that you use a period instead of a colon. This also has precedent -- even in the pre-RFC822 days, Berkeley addresses of the form "site:user" were transformed into "site.user@Berkeley" when sent out over the ARPANET, 'cause most outgoing-ARPANET-mail programs had a misfeature that made them choke on addresses with colons in them. -- Rich Wales UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024 // (213) 825-5683 ARPA: wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA UUCP: ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales
ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist) (08/28/84)
Why in the world do you want to put colons in addresses anyway? Using exclamation points in addresses is a fine standard. Is it really unimplementable? Kenneth Almquist