[Mailman-Developers] case-sensitive e-mail addresses

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/2/01 8:30 AM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

> Hmmm...  Ok.  If *you* think that, Chuq, I'll re-evaulate my opinion.  I
> hadn't compared it with 821.  I'm wondering why, though, they didn't
> make that explicit in the rewrite.

I can think of two reasons:

1) they're really codifying existing practices -- nobody was paying
attention to the case sensitivity issue anyway, but in a nod to the previous
standard, they didn't want to throw it out completely. It allows them to get
it out of the way while still claiming (for the most part) backwards
compatibility.

2) they wanted it in the standard and out the door before the fight
started... (grin)

In my big muther custom server, I squash everything to LC (and in fact,
since my backend data store is mysql, making things case sensitive would
require some significant work). I've found no cases (not few -- none) where
this has caused a problem, and in fact the only time case issues come up at
all is when an AOL user can't find their subscription and emails me for help
and says something like "if you can't find juser@aol.com, try Juser..."

I probably shouldn't squash case, really, but it simplifies dealing with
this stuff somewhat, and I've found from watching the search strings that
most users don't try to maintain case in their lookups anyway... Except from
AOL, where it's cosmetic...

I haven't really pawed through the new standard in detail, but from what
I've seen, I think the intent is to say that case sensitivity is optional
("may be", not "must be"), and I think that implies that if you want to
write stuff that's case sensitive on your local system, that's fine, but you
can no longer assume it'll work once it leaves your control. Which is, in
practice, how it's been for many years...