Erick Calder:
> On Sep 25, 2009, at 6:34 AM, Wietse Venema wrote:
>
> > Patrick Ben Koetter:
> >> Everybody seems to use recipient delimiters. I wonder if there's a
> >> standard
> >> that specifies a recipient delimiter functionality or did it just
> >> appear one
> >> day and people adopted it without a spec or anything.
> >>
> >> Anybody knows?
> >
> > As far as I know, the basic email RFCs have no concept of structured
> > local parts. All they require is that the local part of an address
> > satisfies the syntax rules. If you know that you will never have
> > a username with an 'x' in it, you could use 'x' as the field
> > separator.
> >
> > However, there are some developments for "subaddress" support, e.g.
> > http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-newman-email-subaddr-00.
>
> this brings to mind: I've long used plussed addresses and love that
> feature but my only complaint is that many systems disallow the + sign
> in an e-mail address... is there a way to have a character bag work as
> the delimiter? i.e. any of a list of characters? (obviously a dot "."
> could also serve well as a delimiter since it's well accepted... but
> not as nice as + or /, or even -)
It could be done. It would however be a pain to convert everything
from the current hard-coded assumption of a single delimiter, and
it would require an additional abstraction layer.
However when you increase the number of delimiters, you can also
increase the number of table lookups.
Wietse
> p.s there's another good reason for me: my address is [email protected] which
> is too short for many sites... so I usually then use e
> [email protected] which allows me to know, when I get spam at that
> address, where my address was stolen from.
