Re: objections, again

["D. J. Bernstein" <[e-mail]>]

Finally Chris admits some of his mistakes.

Chris, I invite you to write an INFORMATIONAL document explaining how
e-mail addresses are controlled in AMS.

> If they choose to use this variety of subaddressing, then they'd have to
> change those addresses or configure in a special MTA alias.

In contrast, qmail _automatically_ handles existing accounts that
contain the separator character.

Why are you trying to standardize an inferior mechanism?

> RFC 2142 clearly requires that it be "widget-request".

Correct. Now, with your ``+'' as a separator, the widget account doesn't
control this ``widget-request'' address, unless the sysadmin sets up one
of your ``special MTA aliases.''

In contrast, with ``-'' as a separator, the widget account automatically
controls ``widget-request'', so the user's favorite MLM can use
``widget-request'' without special sysadmin support.

Why are you trying to standardize an inferior mechanism?

> This is an interesting scenario.

Do you deny that an MLM ``upgraded'' to support your requirements will
cause this security mechanism to fail?

> The address encoding used in SMTP is "a,b+c"@d.e for that address.

What are you saying? All MUAs have to use SMTP? I'm talking about local
UNIX MUAs that pass addresses to the submission agent on the command
line---there are more than thirty programs in this category. If they
follow your interface requirements, they produce incorrect results with
MMDF and qmail for all quoted addresses.

> Linking the proposal to a single product when it is already in multiple
> products is deceptive.

Not at all. Obviously one vendor can imitate another vendor's features.

What's deceptive is your list of supporting products:

   * CMU (AMS, Cyrus) and Innosoft (PMDF) have paid you.

   * sendmail's support is pathetic---it doesn't allow user-controlled
     configuration by default.

   * Pine's support doesn't exist; it was your unverified speculation.

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