Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 11:53:33 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Sender: Mark Crispin <mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU>
Subject: re: 822 problem list
To: John Gardiner Myers <jgm+@CMU.EDU>
Cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Ujp8Phy00WBwA9xywy@andrew.cmu.edu>
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On Tue,  6 Jun 1995 12:48:45 -0400 (EDT), John Gardiner Myers wrote:
> 6.2.2 continues to be problematic.  The wording in RFC1123 5.2.18
> should completely replace 6.2.2.

This was a sop to old religion.  I think it can be flushed.

> 6.2.5 appears to be obsolete.  At least I don't understand it.

This had to do with CSnet mailboxes and the small matter that my email address
at the time was "ADMIN.MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA".  Dave Crocker and I argued about
this for a long time; he claimed that the "ADMIN." was a subdomain name when
in fact it was just a part of my user name (MRC was a subdirectory of the root
level ADMIN directory).  But, having special semantics in RFC 822 for CSnet
format addresses such as smith.utexas@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA was important to Dave,
and we couldn't achieve cloture on my proposal to just say that "." was an
ordinary character.

Rather than revive this old war (hi Dave!), I suggest we just decree that it's
been "overtaken by events" and can be flushed.

This would tend to push towards removing "." from the list of specials.

-- Mark --