On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 21:38, Carl Hutzler wrote:
FROM: "Carl Hutzler" <cdhutzler(_at_)aol(_dot_)com>
The latter address is the email address which is
cdhutzler(_at_)aol(_dot_)com(_dot_) Carl
Hutzler is the display name or pretty name. We do not display the pretty
name in our AOL clients. Never have.
Ok, it seems to me that a RFC needs to state what a MUA MUST display. I
can see the value of the display part has when an email address looks
like this:
From: <3232234322(_at_)compuserve(_dot_)com>
Outlook's behavior of displaying just the display part is obviously bad,
but AOL just displaying the address seems flawed to me as well. Aunt
Tilly won't remember that's nephew Carl's email address when she's using
AOL. I'd say MUA must display the whole line:
From: "Nephew Carl" <3232234322(_at_)compuserve(_dot_)com>
Now Roger's example of
From: "support(_at_)bankofamerica(_dot_)com" <phish(_at_)phisher(_dot_)com>
would be more suspect. I realize that this doesn't solve the problem.
MUA are going to have to provide easy certificate management. Maybe
Firefox will add something along the lines of its RSS integration to
make life easy:
1) visit bank, sign up
2) browser recognizes MUA certificate and asks user to install it for
MUA
Even that may not prevent Aunt Tilly from being scammed, as certificates
expire and that opens another opportunity for scam artists.
The default behavior may just have to become 'don't trust anyone'.
FOAF now seems like an interesting idea to explore.
--
Jeff Macdonald <jeff(_dot_)macdonald(_at_)e-dialog(_dot_)com>
E-Dialog