scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) (01/30/88)
[Please excuse this somewhat niave question ... ]
In a recent message in another news group, Greg Woods <woods@hao.ucar.edu>
decried the use of "user" names that in contain the character ".". In
a mail conversation I pointed out that RFC822 specifically allows them
to which he replied that they would cause indigestion to lots of mailers
in the real world.
Is he correct? What mailers don't like dots in the user name?
Do mail gateways between RFC822 compliant worlds (like the Internet)
and non-compliant worlds (like UUCP?) quote user names containing
dots as a matter of course?
-- Steve
scc%uk.ac.cam.cl@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
scc@cam-cl.uucp
...!mcvax!ukc!cam-cl!scc
esj@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Eric S. Johnson) (02/01/88)
In article <1133@jenny.cl.cam.ac.uk> scc@cl.cam.ac.uk (Stephen Crawley) writes: >[Please excuse this somewhat niave question ... ] > >In a recent message in another news group, Greg Woods <woods@hao.ucar.edu> >decried the use of "user" names that in contain the character ".". In >a mail conversation I pointed out that RFC822 specifically allows them >to which he replied that they would cause indigestion to lots of mailers >in the real world. > >Is he correct? What mailers don't like dots in the user name? > The prototype sendmail.cf that I used as a base for all of ours came from Berkeley. In ruleset 3 it would rewrite x.y as x<@y> (the cannonical form). I.E. x.y was treated like x@y. This was due to some older (pre 822) local Berkeleyism. This would not bother RFC822 addresses, which were dealt with on earlier lines, but did cause problems with RFC976 addresses. Due to the order that the rules would apply, any address like host.domain.toplevel!user would get mangled to look like domain.toplevel!user@host. I took out the offending line. Newer proto sendmail.cf files that I have seen dont have this problem. I don't think the one that came with 4.3BSD had this problem. But some mailers out there may still have that problem. This could also cause trouble for local mail to a user with a dot in their username. -- In Real Life: UUCP: ...ihnp4!codas!ufcsv!beach.cis.ufl.edu!esj Eric S. Johnson II Internet: esj@beach.cis.ufl.edu University of Florida "Your species is always dying and suffering" -Q
ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (02/02/88)
Back in the DIM times MMDF used to use "." as we would use
"%", that is, as a routing indicator in the local address.
To mail to CSNET sites, for instance, you sent to
user.host@udel-relay
Since there were a bunch of people that used .'s in their user
names, it eventially got replaced with %. (Johns Hopkins actually
changed all the periods in their user names to underscores to
avoid the problem).
In any case, the local host these days should NEVER do ANYTHING
with the stuff to the left of the @-sign. ANy attempt to be
clever here is doomed to fail. Pretty much % and . should be safe.
I'd make a special warning about "!" in mailbox names as this
does frequently cause problems (even if ! is in the porition of the
address outside the <>). However addresses with both !'s and @'s
are subject to ambiguity about whether the ! binds tighter than the
@ (depends on which side of the gateway you're on).
-Ron