From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Wed Mar 21 2001 - 12:54:31 CST
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz (Shmuel@acm.org):
>John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> said:
>>If the poster(s) decide to use an invalid address in the
>>From-content, it should have the string ".invalid" appended to
>>indicate that it is invalid.
>Why?
Because people who cannot stand seeing email bounces want every address
that they won't be able to send email to if their little hearts desire it
to be marked in some way so they know that if they decide to send email
it won't be delivered. I think it's silly, but that is their goal. And
that is what this standard is going to say even if there is no reason to
justify it. I've done the best I could and at least I got it down to a
SHOULD instead of a MUST. If you want to take a run at getting the SHOULD
removed, I support you.
>The requirement should simply be that it ends in
>.invalid, not that he went through some prescribed process to generate
>it.
There is no procedure involved here. Nobody is saying this is how you
generate the address that is invalid, only that this is how you flag it to
protect the sensibilities of the precious amongst us.
>How about
>The mailbox that results from removing the ".invalid" flag should not
>be an otherwise valid address, unless the poster is authorized to use
>that address.
Then the address being flagged is not invalid and the flag does not mean
what it claims to mean.
How about:
The mailbox should be valid. If it is not, people will hate you and
complain about having wasted their time trying to send you email even if
you didn't want them to. They will pretend you are the greatest abuser of
the net since C&S and you have broken their fine software. If you are fine
with that, so are we.
Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se):
>So far so good, except I don't really se why you have a lowercase
>"should".
Because that is all I think it merits. That is MORE than I think it
merits.
>But the only way to guarantee that is to have that address to end in
>.invalid, so you would need to use addresses like
>sommar@algonet.se.invalid.invalid.
If you cannot come up with an invalid address other than by appending
.invalid to your valid address, I'm sorry.
>Possibly you could say:
> The mailbox that results from removing the ".invalid" flag should not be
> an address.that is known to be valid, unless the poster is authorized to
> use that address.
No, that is exactly not what we could say to solve the problem that I am
pointing out.