ietf-822
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Re: Mandatory From field, anonymity, and hacks

2004-07-25 21:29:21

regarding gateways - in general the job of the gateway is to preserve
the semantics of the original message into the destination environment. the job of the gateway is NOT to correct errors in the original message.

Well, that's an issue with the RFC 2821 text, which ought to be up for
review Real Soon Now. It seems that the intent of RFC 2821 is that e.g.
in the case of an X.400 to Internet mail gateway, the address on the
Internet side should be a valid and usable Internet address.

it's pretty difficult to write useful general specifications for gateway behavior. it's hard enough to write specifications for a specific case like X.400 to Internet mail. trying to make every bit of RFC 2821bis apply to gateways is probably a fool's errand.

we don't expect native MUAs to go to great lengths to prevent invalid or unusable addresses from appearing messages. why should we impose this burden on gateways?

when gateways have to translate addresses from one format to another (as they do between X.400 and internet mail), they should make sure that the resulting addresses are valid syntax. this is just sanity checking. the reason it's necessary is that there are usually some addresses that cannot be translated. but that's not the same thing as ensuring that the address is valid.

tcreating a new TLD to indicate an invalid address is probably a bad idea even within Usenet. rather than trying to fix internet mail to accommodate a bad idea in Usenet, maybe the Usenet people need to come up with a better idea.