ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

Mon Jun 30 07:36:04 UTC 2008

Terribly stupid question, but one aproppos to this thread.

If my company pays for and registers a new TLD, let's
call it "smtp" for grins, and I create an A record for "smtp."
in my top level zone file, how will users outside my company
resolve and reach that address?

If they simply use "smtp" as the hostname, most of the
current resolver libraries will append the local domain
name, so that instead of reaching my A record for smtp,
they'll end up trying to reach smtp.their.domain.

Will operating system manufacturers release updated
resolver libraries that no longer assume that single
token names should have the local domain attached?

Or should I always ensure that resolvers reach my
domain explicitly by including the trailing "dot" in
all uses, so that my email would be given out as
"myname at smtp." in the hopes that everyone would
correctly remember to add the "." at the end when
entering my email address into their mail clients?

In the past, this wasn't really a concern, as you never
had a case of a single entity owning an entire TLD,
and as such you'd never see A or MX records showing
up for an entire TLD.  But now, with private ownership
of TLDs possible, that could very well be the case in
the future.  Google could register .gmail, and decide
that they want to have the shortest, easiest to remember
addresses, so people can just be "user at gmail" (well,
until MSN gets in the business, and decides that their
users should have even shorter addresses, and register
.msn so that their users can be "user at msn".  ^_^; )

Or does the current resolver logic already handle
these cases (check root, work your way down
stopping at the first match found; if you run out
of tokens in the string being resolved, append the
local domain name to the string and start the process
over)?

Simply looking to solidify my understanding of how
these new names would resolve.

Thanks!

Matt