Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
To: Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Subject: Re: changes 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 01 Jun 1995 01:31:47 PDT."
             <MailManager.801995507.19114.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM> 
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Date: Thu, 01 Jun 1995 12:21:46 -0700
From: michael.derrico@software.com (Michael D'Errico)
Message-ID: <19950601192115375.AAA93@rome.software.com>

> I don't know if this is permitted by the charter or not, but I would like to
> eliminate the following foolish (and commonly violated) requirements of 822:
> 
> 1) Simplify the syntax, remove obnoxious restrictions:
>     a) Remove ".", "[", and "]" from specials.
>     b) Redefine local-part as word.
>     c) Redefine domain as atom.
>     d) Remove sub-domain, domain-literal, and domain-ref

This would certainly clean up my address parser, but there is at least one 
case that would not carry forward to the new definition.  Since <word> is 
defined to be either an <atom> or a <quoted-string>, you could no longer have 
something like:

    From: "Michael D'Errico"."Technical Support"@Software.com

Granted this format is rarely (if ever) used, but it would become illegal 
under the new definition.

Also, any mailer that currently folds long lines based on tokens could break 
a new system that uses these rules.  For example, half of a domain name could 
be separated from the other half by CR LF SPACE (I believe zmailer used to do 
this). 

I'm in favor of these simpler rules, but we also need to make sure we 
consider all the effects.

Mike