On 7/5/2013 1:56 PM, John Levine wrote:
All I'm saying is that there's a lot of existing and useful practice
which expects to be able to distinguish an alias (presumably without a
dot) from a FQDN. ...
Well, yes. Take a look at SAC 053 and see if there's anything they
missed:
http://www.icann.org/en/groups/ssac/documents/sac-053-en.pdf
IMO, the report is wrong on an essential detail. It attributes the
handling barrier to SMTP, which has no such barrier.
Here's my summary of the situation:
1. SMTP does not prohibit dotless domains. So, as far as the
protocol is concerned foo@example is as legal as foo(_at_)example(_dot_)com.
2. A wide range of independently-developed mail-receiving
software treats a dotless hostname as /not/ a legal domain name and
thereby filters it out as potentially hostile. A common example that
justifies this is 'localhost'.
So there is indeed a widespread, very solid email barrier to usage
of dotless hostnames, although it is from long-standing receiving
software practice, rather than from the protocol specification.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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