daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) (12/13/87)
In article <12072@orchid.waterloo.edu> egisin@orchid.UUCP writes: >Maybe we are talking about different things, but I don't see anything in >rfc 822 that suggests what does and does not belong in comments. Quite correct: I double-checked and found that the latest RFC's where not only missing explanations, they contained errors in their examples. Jon Postel et all, shame on you! Seriously, though, the comment field was in there for expansion of non-human-oriented into something a human would want to read. The canonical use in the pre-domain era was to put real addresses in when the mailer demanded things like FOO-BAR@ZOT.ARPA or (even worse) @ZOT.ARPA,FOO-BAR. (This last was actually an old uucp-style path: not everything dArpa did made sense). Lst month a site that still had the code to parse addresses out of comments blew up on one of my jobs postings: it said Reply-to: (Please don't!) And a mailer went west at a high rate of speed (no, it didn't send mail to Please and don't on the local machine). Therefore, one should be cautious about what we do with ill-documented but historically important fields. I would welcome a discussion (mail, please) on defining the peculiar spots closed. I suspect most of the significant information will be found in the 822-to-X400 RFC. --dave (sorry, guys) c-b -- David Collier-Brown. {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind) CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.