> > I agree.  For me personally, this was not hypothetical.  The 
> > Pine mail user agent that I use began to intermittently fail 
> > to connect to the IMAP server even when there was no evidence 
> > of problems with network connectivity.  The problem turned 
> > out to be DNS fraud.
> > 
> > I use ssh to connect over DSL service from Earthlink, and 
> > port forwarding to get to the IMAP server.  That means Pine 
> > needs to connect to 127.0.0.1 on the forwarded port number.  
> > I don't know why, but Pine does a DNS lookup on 127.0.0.1.  
> 
> Stop right there. You have a buggy application. You loose. Tough.
> 
> If you have buggy applications you should fix them. You should not raise the 
> buggy behavior at the IETF, ICANN or inter-ISP level as an urgent problem.
> 
> There is limited bandwidth and much better things for all these bodies to be 
> doing with their time.
> 
> We have a real problem with Internet Crime that is causing rather more proble
> ms than your buggy mailer.

        Actually if you had read the followup this was not a
        application error but a operator error.  Operator errors
        are exactly what this misbehaviour depends on.  This a
        perfectly good example of unexpected consequences.

        Note this also breaks the expectations of RFC 1123

           If a dotted-decimal number can be entered without such
           identifying delimiters, then a full syntactic check must be
           made, because a segment of a host domain name is now allowed
           to begin with a digit and could legally be entirely numeric
           (see Section 6.1.2.4).  However, a valid host name can never 
           have the dotted-decimal form #.#.#.#, since at least the
           highest-level component label will be alphabetic.

        This implies that entering a address query for #.#.#.# will
        NOT return a RRset.

-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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