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

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 08:43:17AM -0700, Chuq Von Rospach 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.

But is this actually true?  I haven't tried it, but I thought sendmail
still treated LHS's as case-sensitive...

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

<chuckle>

> 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..."

Hmmm...

> 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...

Indeed.

> 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...

Hmmm... *I* interpreted it to mean "someone out there might be treating
this as case-sensitive, so you ought to be careful not to break their
shit."

But I can see your interpretation as well..

Cheers,
-- jr 'be ye not overly annoying... nor too easily annoyed' a
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 804 5015