ISSUE: Possibility to use non-resolvable domain name as path-identity

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Issue # requested

There were two alternative texts in Usepro-06, of which Russ arbitrarily
chose one.

This issue originally arose from a suggestion by Harald that a domain name
(e.g. foo.com) could be used as a <path-identity> even though the only
records in the DNS were at one level lower (e.g. news.foo.com,
mail.foo.com).

For sure, people are likely to do it whatever we say, but I regard it as
an undesirable practice. I therefore wish to make it a SHOULD NOT (or
rather to say it SHOULD be resolvable, to MX/A/AAAA/CNAME, in the DNS,
which amounts to the same thing).

Also, I wish to see a mention of RFC 2142, just to draw attention to its
existence. It does have the status of a draft-standard, although we have
agreed that we do not intend either to supersede/obsolete/commend it.
There were two wordings in Usepro-06, of which I would suggest

   NOTE: According to [RFC 2142], the forms "usenet@<path-identity>" and
   "news@<path-identity>" are common addresses for a news server
   administrator.

which uses a little bit of each of each. I do not want to take any position
on the relative merits of "usenet@" and "news@".

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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