From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jan 17 2001 - 06:19:10 CST
In <ylhf2z8wmz.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> So our document will probably be the first to mention RFC 2606 and
>> ".invalid" explicitly. The question then is, can we, or should we, say
>> something like "User agents MUST/SHOULD NOT attempt to send email to the
>> TLD '.invalid'". One could argue that genuine interoperability did arise
>> there, and I think that is what Brad is asking for. Or do we just say,
>> in the NOTE, that any attempt to send such email will likely lead to a
>> refusal by the MTA.
>I don't understand how anyone could possibly consider this to be an
>interoperability problem. Perhaps people are using a different definition
>of that term than I am.
I didn't say it WAS an interoperability problem. I said "One could argue
that ...".
>An interoperability problem, I thought, meant that if one did that one's
>implementation would not be able to successfully talk to another
>conforming implementation of the standard, or that something significantly
>bad might happen.
"One could argue that ..." extra DNS and SMTP traffic were something
significantly bad.
> The *protocol* act of sending mail to a .invalid
>address is outside of the scope of our standard, since we aren't the SMTP
>folks, and apart from that an article with a .invalid From address acts
>just like any other news article, so I don't see how this could be the
>first issue.
I agree that this should be left to the mail people to standardise, if
they think fit (and likely with a SHOULD rather than a MUST). But we might
mention in a NOTE that MTAs might well refuse to attempt such deliveries.
We are certainly gpoing to say that our user agents Ought Not to try.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 436 6131 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5