On 6 November 1998, Christopher Lindsey
<lindsey(_at_)ncsa(_dot_)uiuc(_dot_)edu> wrote:
That wasn't me, it was Liviu Daia... :)
If this is true, then it's a bug in sendmail. The username part in
e-mail addresses _is_ case sensitive (as opposed to the machine name
part, which isn't) --- usernames on Unix are case sensitive.
Seriously though, the non case sensitivity of email is probably
(i'd like to know the history) a design decision, not unintentional.
I've heard all kinds of rumors about the reasoning behind this, but
I'm not sure which are true or not. One is that ancient terminals
didn't allow for lowercase characters (while others did), so case
insensitivity was implemented to make them compatible.
Version 6.42 added the F=u mailer flag to compensate, but it's a
mailer flag -- so it doesn't affect the sendmail internals (i.e.
aliases). And since the aliases are internal, is it really
non-RFC compliant? I mean, you can *type* the alias with any
case you want -- it's just that sendmail has only one way to deal
with it... The headers never change though...
I'd sure hate to maintain a system where I had multiple aliases
that only differed based on case sensitivity.
Chris