John Klensin writes:
Most unextended viewers display everything they get, trace fields and
X-blather and all. Let's not debate whether it should be that way, it
really is.
I'm willing to believe you, but can't... Do the other people on this
mailing list agree with John on this specific point? Do *many* people
see *every* Received line?
But the problem with both of these is one of creating and maintaining
bindings between the "real" (822) headers and the extended ones,
especially as mail is gatewayed into non-SMTP systems, forward, resent,
and replied to.
Yes, but you wouldn't be much worse off than you are now. If the From
line was gatewayed through some unextended gateway, you'd end up with
From: Yasushi Nakahara *1 <ynk(_at_)ome(_dot_)toshiba(_dot_)co(_dot_)jp>
instead of the *current* (i.e. today's)
From: Yasushi Nakahara <ynk(_at_)ome(_dot_)toshiba(_dot_)co(_dot_)jp>
And, whatever you design as an introducer for this sort of thing,
someone will have used it in an atypical context, e.g.,
Subject: Problem discussion message number *3*
Yes, I realize this now. Bob Smart pointed out yesterday that *1, *2,
etc can easily become inconsistent if people cut and paste people's
addresses from other messages, etc as they do today.
But I don't like the way Nathaniel's example looks:
From: $Keld_JXrn_Simonsen <keld(_at_)dkuug(_dot_)dk>
So how about making "_" the special character, instead of "$"? And
allow the "_" to be anywhere in the string, e.g.
From: Keld_Jorn_Simonsen <keld(_at_)dkuug(_dot_)dk>
In the RFC, we could write that the suggested convention is to
romanize the name (or text) and replace any spaces with "_"s. The
romanization would be supplied by a human, of course.
(Keld, how would you romanize your middle name? Jorn? Joern? Journ?)
I think this would reduce the possibility of mismatches to an extent
where I would be inclined to say "Let's not worry about it. This is
only header info, and only intended for humans."
(The Smart/Freed proposal and others don't have this problem, but they
do have other problems...)
Where's my asbestos suit...
Cheers,
EvdP