From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Tue Mar 20 2001 - 14:22:54 CST
John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
> Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk):
>
> >Here, just to remind everybody, is the relevant text from section 5, as
> >modified during our Oughtification pass over that section:
>
> > The mailbox in the From-content SHOULD be a valid address, belonging
> > to the poster(s) of the article, or person or agent on whose behalf
> > the post is being sent (see the Sender header, 6.2). When, for
> > personal reasons, the poster wishes to indicate that the address is
> > not a valid email address, the From-content SHOULD be an address
> > which ends in the top level domain of ".invalid" [RFC 2606].
>
> Notice that this section says NOTHING about the "mailbox" in the From
> header NOT belonging to anyone, just that it doesn't belong to the poster
> or person on whose behalf yada yada.
>
> Now, you could argue that the second sentence has nothing to do with the
> first, that the first sentence is NOT the topic sentence of the paragraph
> and does not set up the case for the rest of this paragraph, and that
> there is no possible parallelism between the first and second sentence,
> but you would be wrong. If the second sentence truly does describe a
> situation completely different than the topic of the paragraph as defined
> in the first sentence, then it should start its own paragraph. Otherwise,
> it is a continuation of the topic, which is set up by the first sentence.
Indeed, there is a leap between the two sentences that is a bit too
big. Here's a suggestion:
The mailbox in the From-content SHOULD be a valid address, belonging
to the poster(s) of the article, or person or agent on whose behalf
the post is being sent (see the Sender header, 6.2). When, for
personal reasons, the poster does not wish to include such an adddress
as described in the pervious sentence, the From-content SHOULD be an
address which ends in the top level domain of ".invalid" [RFC 2606].
In difference to the text in the draft, the hint that you only need to
add .invalid to be fine is not as big, but admittedly you can still
jump to that conclusion. Of course we could also say:
The mailbox in the From-content SHOULD be a valid address, belonging
to the poster(s) of the article, or person or agent on whose behalf
the post is being sent (see the Sender header, 6.2). When, for
personal reasons, the poster does not wish to include such an adddress
as described in the pervious sentence, the From-content SHOULD be an
address which ends in the top level domain of ".invalid" [RFC 2606].
In this case whatever that comes before .invalid does not to have
any connection to the poster's actual address, or any other existing
address.
But I suppose this is covered by RFC2606 and thus superfluous.
By the way, is that "for personal reasons" really needed?
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se