| at least in those days, gateway proponents didn't insist that people
| shouldn't include email addresses in the bodies of their messages.
You miss the point that including "GRECO::MARYK" as an email address
in a USENET message is about as useful as including 10.0.0.26 in an
IP header -- the local meaning is essentially unusable to a non-local
recipient.
Actually it was sort of useful, if you knew how to translate.
(or could find a local mail expert that did)
But you missed the point I was trying to make. in those days, the inability
of the mail network (or at least parts of it) to support a single global
address space was correctly recognized as a deficiency in the network -
and people took action to solve the problem (notably deployng MX records).
Nowadays people often act as if NATs were the way the Internet was supposed
to work, and that it's the applications and the users of those applications
who are broken if they want a network that supports a global address space.
Actually it's the other way around, and people are taking action to
increase the brokenness.
RFC-822 was a great leap forward for embedding a global namespace into
text messages, and I am pleased to say that even my own RFC-822 address
works fine at UKY, despite my NAT stance. :-)
Yes, and IP was a great leap forward for having a singal global namespace
and a single message format to send over all manner of transmission media.
It worked quite well at this until NATs came along.
Now you're suggesting that we need yet another layer, presumably something
that runs over NATs. Given the current state of NAT deployment, it's hard
to fault that reasoning. But it really does seem that we've solved that
problem before, and to solve it again in a less efficient way seems like
taking one tiny step forward to try to counteract a huge step backward.
Keith