[Mailman-Developers] Opening up a few can o' worms here...

Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Thu, 18 Jul 2002 10:27:13 -0400


On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 05:26:11PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>     JRA> 2822 3.4.1 says that the *LHS* cannot have a trailing dot
>     JRA> without quoting it... but in the next graf, it seems to punt
>     JRA> the interpretation of "domain" to 1034.
> 
> Which circular references back to RFC 822. :)
> 
> But anyway I thought we were talking about the localpart.

No, I was talking about the domain part.

The standard is pretty clear that the LHS can have anything in it you
want, as long as you quote it.

>     JRA> You're right, that *is* what the standard says, and I'm
>     JRA> surprised they left it that way in the rewrite; that is *not*
>     JRA> the way it should have been done.  There are good reasons why
>     JRA> you might want to terminate a domain name, even in email --
> --------------------------------------------------^
> Did you leave out "with a dot" ?

No; domain names that end in a dot are referred to in jargon as
"terminated" or "rooted".  At least, the jargon I'm used to...

>     JRA> though mostly diagnostic ones, admittedly.
> 
> Hmm, not a use case I've ever encountered.  "localhost.localdomain" is
> about as wacky as it gets.

Well, diagnosing local DNS configuration, mostly.  A name that does
*not* end in a dot is supposed to be an invitation to apply the search
list from /etc/resolv.conf.

With people having things registered like com.com and edu.com, it can
get a bit wacky.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

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