Postmaster document - clarification of RFC1173 quote

[Allan Cargille <[e-mail]>]

Hi, after Jeroen's question about the quotation in my draft from
RFC1173 (Responsibilities of host and network managers: A summary of
the "oral tradition" of the Internet), I mailed the author and asked
him to clarify the text that I was referencing.  Here is his reply.  I
thought that others might be interested in seeing it.

Cheers,

allan

======================================================================

Delivery time: Jan 8, 1993 13:41:51 
From: c=us/prmd=Internet/RFC-822=jbvb(a)ftp.com 
Subject: Re: could you clarify this text in rfc1173 please?

    Hi, I wrote an Internet Draft that references RFC1173.  We were
    unclear about what the text below from your RFC means.  Could you tell
    us what an "Internet host that handles mail beyond the local network"
    is?

I was attempting to say that mail relays and servers internal to a
particular administrative domain need not have separate postmasters.
If they make SMTP connections to hosts outside the administrative
domain, then they need a postmaster.
    
    } 
    } >                the email address "postmaster" be supported at all
    } >                hosts.  This paper extends this concept to X.400 mail
    } >                domains which have registered RFC1327 mapping rules
    } >                (and therefore which appear to have normal RFC822-style
    } >                addresses).
    } . 
    } 
    } . 
    } >           3.  Proposed Solution
    } > 
    } >           To fully achieve the desired seamless integration of email
    } >           domains for which RFC1327 mapping rules have been defined,
    } >           the following convention must be followed,
    } > 
    } >               If there are any valid addresses of the form
    } >               "user@domain", then the address "postmaster@domain"
    } >               must also be valid.
    } > 
    } >           To express this in terms of X.400:  For every X.400 domain
    } >           for which an RFC1327 mapping rule exists, if any address of
    } >           the form
    } 

Your excerpt above uses different criteria to obtain a less-ambiguous
answer, but the effect is the same.

James B. VanBokkelen		2 High St., North Andover, MA  01845
FTP Software Inc.		voice: [phone]  fax: [phone]