dcrocker@udel-eecis3.delaware (Dave Crocker) (07/09/84)
Over the past few months, there were some items about the history of some decisions that were made in 822. While you all have not doubt moved on to more weighty matters, I just read the messages and thought a bit of clarification might be useful. In a feeble attempt to head off some of the likely comments, let me add the caveat that what follows is reporting, only. The hindsight of experience may well lead you to (continue to) wish for different choices. The naming of 'Resent-X' was the result of a small effort at political sensitivity. 'Remail-xx' and 'Redistribute-xx' were already in use and the choice of either one could have led the other to have felt slighted. In retrospect, I rather like the source of humor that seems to have resulted. Requiring a phrase, before a route-address was a more personal (and obscure) choice. My feeling was that addresses which have as much text as an address with full routing information would be essentially unreadable. It therefore would be considerate to the recipient(s) to separate the address information from the reference to the 'name' of the person owning the cited mailbox. One note on this issue indicated that the prefatory phrase had no semantics; that is not strictly true. It is supposed to be a string that names (as opposed to addressing) a person/process/role. While this has no semantics for mail-handling software, people tend to find it useful. The hack of filling in the local-part, in the absence of a sender-provided string, into the phrase, sounds like an excellent idea. Well, this ended up as more than reporting. Still, if anyone responds to this, note that I am tending to read my mail about once a month, if that. Dave