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Re: Mandatory From field, anonymity, and hacks

2004-08-10 13:13:26

In <4112E083(_dot_)7020906(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> Bruce Lilly 
<blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:

Charles Lindsey wrote:

No, that is exactly what RFC 3696 does _not_ say. You have already 
presumed to understand what the authors of RFC 2606 intended to say,
and  been proved wrong. Do you want me to write to John Klensin and ask
him  what he really meant in RFC 3696?

Knock yourself out. Go ahead and ask him if he thinks hard-coding
recognition of ".invalid" is a good idea or not.

I have written to John Klensin, and he makes several interesting comments.

Firstly, he points out that IANA has less authority to reserve TLDs than
it had when RFC 2606 appeared, though he agrees that it is hardly
conceivable that ICANN would ever allow it to be taken (note that RFC 2606
has BCP status, which implies an IESG approval).

However, he also points out that use of .invalid should NOT cause any
serious problem for the root servers, since apparently the standards
require negative caching to be properly implemented.

As regards RFC 3696, it certainly does not forbid local checking, but
rather places an onus on those doing the checking to be careful that they
are acting upon up-to-date information; moreover affirmative exclusions
(such as provided by RFC 2606) provide much better evidence than mere
observation of what currently does and does not work.

But finally, he makes the very sensible point that what user agents really
need to do is to bring up an instant Warning to the user "you appear to be
about to send email to a non-existent TLD; do you want to continue?" If
the user persists in spite of such a warning, then on his head be it.

I would have no problem in modifying the USEFOR draft to take a line like
that.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clerew(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, 
CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5