Underscores in host names

Thu May 19 10:57:10 UTC 2005

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Brad Knowles wrote:
>
> 	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.

This reminds me of the problems with JANET-order versus Internet-order
mail domains that caused some email for cl.cam.ac.uk to go via Chile.

Tony.
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