Underscores in host names
Brad Knowles
brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Thu May 19 09:45:09 UTC 2005
At 6:10 PM -0700 2005-05-18, william(at)elan.net wrote:
> The only reason it has not been discussed more actively is that no
> TLD operator has yet come forward and said that they are going to use
> TLD host for emails, but as soon as one does this would have to be
> accommodated and quickly (otherwise it will remain as an open issue
> for future update to SMTP - probably RFC4821 if this numbering
> continues :)
Check Guinea-Bissau for .gw. This has been a source of heartburn
for many years. Any site that has a mail gateway system and uses
unqualified hostnames is at risk, because mail to "fred at gw" could
legitimately be interpreted two different ways, and mail could be
mis-directed.
I did some consulting at a major wall street trading firm that
had this problem, and the only reason we ever found out that
something truly bizarre was going on was because we were getting back
these bounces which we couldn't explain, because we knew for sure
that the user portion was legitimate. Then we started looking closer
at where the bounces were actually coming from.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
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