Path: utzoo!yetti!geac!daveb
From: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Re: Comments in RFC-822 headers
Summary: was The Canadian Domain: Introduction to CA
Keywords: RFC 822 mail comments x.400
Message-ID: <1966@geac.UUCP>
Date: 13 Dec 87 16:02:30 GMT
Article-I.D.: geac.1966
Posted: Sun Dec 13 11:02:30 1987
References: <1987Nov23.095020.13055@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1152@looking.UUCP> <1903@geac.UUCP> <12072@orchid.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown)
Distribution: can
Organization: The little blue rock next to that twinkly star.
Lines: 31

In article <12072@orchid.waterloo.edu> egisin@orchid.UUCP writes:
>Maybe we are talking about different things, but I don't see anything in
>rfc 822 that suggests what does and does not belong in comments.
  Quite correct: I double-checked and found that the latest RFC's
where not only missing explanations, they contained errors in their
examples.  Jon Postel et all, shame on you!

  Seriously, though, the comment field was in there for expansion of
non-human-oriented into something a human would want to read. The
canonical use in the pre-domain era was to put real addresses in
when the mailer demanded things like FOO-BAR@ZOT.ARPA or (even
worse) @ZOT.ARPA,FOO-BAR.  (This last was actually an old uucp-style
path: not everything dArpa did made sense).  
  Lst month a site that still had the code to parse addresses out of
comments blew up on one of my jobs postings: it said
  Reply-to: (Please don't!)
And a mailer went west at a high rate of speed (no, it didn't send
mail to Please and don't on the local machine). Therefore, one
should be cautious about what we do with ill-documented but
historically important fields.

  I would welcome a discussion (mail, please) on defining the
peculiar spots closed.  I suspect most of the significant
information will be found in the 822-to-X400 RFC.

 --dave (sorry, guys) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.                 {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb
 Geac Computers International Inc.,   |  Computer Science loses its
 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, |  memory (if not its mind)
 CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 |  every 6 months.