Re: I-D Action:draft-newman-email-subaddr-01.txt

Randall Gellens <randy@qualcomm.com> Wed, 05 December 2007 22:39 UTC

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Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:36:00 -0800
To: Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>
From: Randall Gellens <randy@qualcomm.com>
Subject: Re: I-D Action:draft-newman-email-subaddr-01.txt
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Cc: Apps Discuss <discuss@apps.ietf.org>, Dave Cridland <dave.cridland@isode.com>
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At 5:20 PM +0100 12/4/07, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

>  On Mon, Dec 03, 2007 at 07:45:47PM -0800,
>   Randall Gellens <randy@qualcomm.com> wrote
>   a message of 95 lines which said:
>
>>  Currently, subaddressing is mostly part of the mostly undocumented
>>  email lore that some implementers are aware of while others are not.
>
>  And that's the right way: subaddressing does not have to be
>  documented, it is a local convention.

Even as a local convention, it is helpful to have a document that describes it.

>   (How can you tell if
>  bortzmeyer@nic.fr is not an address with subaddressing and "m" as the
>  delimiter?)

Only the recipient's environment needs to know.  I certainly don't 
need to know if I'm sending you email if the particular address I 
have for you is subaddressed.

At present, the document does contain text about list servers 
recognizing subaddressing.  This is the one area where I'm not 
convinced.  I can see the benefit, but I think that once we allow for 
anything that isn't after final delivery knowing about subaddressing, 
at that point we have changed it from a purely local convention to 
one that does indeed have meaning elsewhere, and we pretty much are 
then forced to choose a single (or maybe two) character for the 
delimiter.  Because of this, I am wavering as to if we should mention 
list servers or not.
-- 
Randall Gellens
Opinions are personal;    facts are suspect;    I speak for myself only
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The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of
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