Re: Email Subaddressing

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <[e-mail]>]

On 2 Aug 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Date: 2 Aug 1997 07:17:47 -0000
> From: D. J. Bernstein <[e-mail]>
> To: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: Email Subaddressing
> 
> ...
> 
> I have neither the time nor the patience to explain operating system
> design, or my users' needs, to a parade of inexperienced IETF nitwits.

Well, you do seem to have plenty of time to post messages showing how
incapable you are of communicating with anyone having a different viewpoint. 

> The burden is on the aforementioned nitwits to read RFC 2119, section 6,
> and to butt out of areas where they don't belong.

Sorry, that section has almost nothing to do with it.  For example, people
can interoperate fine at the IP level with no domain name service.  And
someone who wanted to could keep jumping up and down and arguing primarily by
dogmantic assertion, as you do, that IP numbers are all you really need to
interoperate and that symbolic names are a purely private issue.  After all,
if people don't like a particular symbolic naming scheme, surely the product
will fail in the market place.  No need for standards here.  That's about
what you are saying about subaddressing. 

In fact, almost all IETF standards are of the form, if you want to do X, 
here is how you should do it.  The fact that not everyone wants to do X 
and can thus interoperate without any X, standard or not, is not very 
relevant.  And the fact that people can interoperate doing X by using 
various ad hoc non-standarized ways, while a factor of varying strength 
against standardization, is by no means a bar to it.

> ---Dan
> Set up a new mailing list in a single command. http://pobox.com/~djb/ezmlm.html

Like most of the nitwits out here, I would like to see some sort of rough 
consensus on a syntax for subaddress for quite a few reasons including 
some I have mentioned previously and as a way to bring a bit more 
pressure on product vendors to include such a feature.

Are you putting up such exaggerated and overblown resistence to this idea 
because you want to minimize the probability of the inclusion of such a 
feature in competing product?

Donald
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