Re: Email Subaddressing

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

Dan,

I'm not sure if the benefits warrant standardization but I don't accept
your arguments by dogmatic assertion:

On 31 Jul 1997, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Date: 31 Jul 1997 08:30:54 -0000
> From: D. J. Bernstein <[e-mail]>
> 
> > There are two cases where MUAs need to cooperate with subaddresses:
> > 1) MUAs which don't allow from to be edited otherwise.
> 
> This is a purely local configuration problem.

If agents wish to constrain from addresses to fight spoofing or whatever but
allow subaddress editing, they can't do it because there is no uniformity of
subadressing.  If there were a standard, they could.  I believe this would be
a benefit. 

Standarizing things has benefits and costs.  The benefits are not eliminated
by you enormous distaste for the particular standarization or your 
failure to acknowledge the benefits.

> > 2) MUAs which validate local addresses against a white pages or authdb
> > service.
> 
> A service that claims to check mail addresses obviously has to
> understand subaddresses. This is a purely local configuration problem.
> 
> > 1) List server restricts posting to subscribers.
> 
> You have no right to demand that list owners accept your mail.

The closest thing I've seen to a demand is your demand that this not be
standardized.  Most list owners want to accept mail and if subaddressing were
standardized, I believe many list servers would adapt to the standard.  If it
is not standardized, some sort of informal consensus might develop but it
would be much slower. 

> > There are several cases where a final delivery agent needs to cooperate
> > with subaddresses:
> 
> All of those cases are purely local configuration problems.
> 
> I suppose next we're going to see a document explaining how sendmail
> interacts with procmail, and requiring that all MTAs and LDAs work the
> same way.

I don't know where you get this idea that IETF standards are requirements.  I
supose you could say that of the tiny handful that are classified as
"mandatory", but that certainly doens't include *any* of the email standards
most of which are in the "recommended" or "elective" categories of IETF
standards.  See RFC 2200.

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

Donald
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