John C Klensin writes:
--On Tuesday, 27 March, 2007 15:21 +0200 Arnt Gulbrandsen
<arnt(_at_)oryx(_dot_)com> wrote:
My two cents:
It's better to disallow localpart(_at_)tld as email address in 2821bis.
That is, I prefer to remain compatible with 2821 rather than with
821.
I have two arguments:
1. The change in 2821 hasn't caused a signficant level of problems,
AFAICT, so why change again?
I would venture the hypothesis, with no hard data at all, that the
change has been generally ignored, possibly on the assumption that it
was a stupid mistake.
Well... I ran a little xargs dig | sort | grep I wc loop now, and see a
depressingly large number of TLDs now have MX records. The first time I
counted that was in the early nineties: 1 TLD MX. Then second was IIRC
around the time 2821 was published: 0. And the third today: 25.
What does this mean? I'm not sure. I think I'd like to hear what some of
the people operating those MXes thing.
$ for a in `cat ~/stuff/all-tld | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort -u` ; do dig
${a}. mx ; done | grep -v ';' | grep MX | sed 's/\..*//' | sort -u |
fmt
ai as bj cf cx dj dm gp gt hr im io kh km mh mq ne ni pa td tk tt ua va ws
Shall I spam postmaster@ those and ask?
So, in principle, one has to be able to deal with the "two valid
meanings" case for all names other than single-parters.
Sure.
I'm not quite sure what this proves, but it doesn't seem to me that
making addressing mail to a TLD simplifies things all that much.
Not in principle. It simplifies handling one common case, an important
one because it's easy to stumble into it. Other (AFAICT less common)
cases remain.
Arnt