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Re: [ietf-smtp] Dotless domains and email

2013-06-21 13:04:23
Dave Crocker wrote:
"3.4    Electronic Mail One serious and prevalent concern is that
dotless domains would not work with protocols that specify additional
rules of what constitutes a legal domain. The most prominent example
is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver electronic
mail. It requires at least two labels in the FQDN of a mail address.
Thus standard-compliant mail servers would reject emails to addresses
such as user@brand."

I'm not seeing this requirement/limitation in RFC 5321. It merely requires an FQDN.

Does anyone have an explanation for the assessment in the ICANN report that at least two levels are required?


I don't see any standards requirement either, but it certainly would be problematic in the Real World. The number of existing software implementations that require externally facing names to contain at least one dot are legion, especially administrative UI's and submission elements. I still run into software that won't accept TLDs that are more than 4 letters long, too. And of course there's the ambiguity that results from suffixes being added -- a problem we already went through with .cs.

<csg>
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