--On Tuesday, 17 April, 2007 12:36 +0200 Arnt Gulbrandsen
<arnt(_at_)oryx(_dot_)com> wrote:
John C Klensin writes:
Bottom line, based on responses received so far, is that no
one is using mail to TLD names. Some think they would like
to.
Ah. I'm sure Verisign would like to _be_ .com ;)
My impression, based on those remarks but, more important, on
my reading of the comments on the list, is that we shouldn't
ban mail to TLD domains, but should clarify and strengthen
the "only FQDNs on the wire" rule.
That would satisfy me, although I remain jittery about highly
unusual syntax. (If 99.99% of email is to non-TLDs, the last
0.01% will attract more than its share of bugs. Is that 0.01%
worth the bugs? But all this is just a parenthetical remark.)
My guess is that, regardless of what we do, the situation will,
in practice, continue more or less as it has been. In other
words, many or most MUAs and Submission servers will not make
the special provisions for identifying the difference between a
TLD name and an abbreviated domain-part that 2821 calls for, and
certainly will not make them in a consistent way. The result
will be that access to mailboxes with TLD domain-parts will not
be usefully and consistently accessible to users and that will
make the "service" hard to market, whether as a user(_at_)TLD
directory or subdomain(_at_)TLD as an alternative form for what has
traditionally been postmaster(_at_)subdomain(_dot_)TLD(_dot_) That situation
will continue until and unless at least as few of the large
gTLDs adopt the model... and that will require an ICANN PDP or
other approval process that would, I predict, take many, many,
years.
But I think the general trend of the discussions is that any
restrictions should not come from the protocol itself.
john