--On Monday, July 16, 2007 9:46 AM +0200 "Peter J. Holzer"
<hjp-ietf-smtp(_at_)hjp(_dot_)at> wrote:
...
| For the VRFY command, the string is a user name or a user
| name and domain (see below). If a normal (i.e., 250)
| response is returned, the response MAY include the full
| name of the user and MUST include the mailbox of the user.
| It MUST be in either of the following forms:
But that snippet indicates that the notion what a "user name"
is changed during the preparation of RFC 2821: "user name and
domain" just doesn't make sense when the user name already
includes the domain.
Nope. Your follow-up suggestion may be helpful, but the spec
anticipated (and some implementations have historically
supported)
VRFY john
to which the response could be any of
* One mailbox, possibly with a display name
* One mailbox and an indication that there were others
* A list of mailboxes in a multiline response
* An indication that the request was ambiguous
* An indication that VRFY wasn't really supported, at least
with that syntax.
One might prefer a more precisely specified command, but it is
more than 20 years too late.
...
john