facts about the real world, part 3

Roy Badami writes:
> So this raises the question, do we believe that there are
> implementations out there that have quirks we need to work around.  Do
> we have any idea what the quirks are?

Certainly. sendmail screws up quoting in the worst possible way; it does
exactly what you accused 822 of doing. If you try sending mail to "A.B"
then sendmail won't deliver it to A.B.

(Perhaps this has been fixed in new versions, but it's certainly true
for a very large fraction of the sendmail installations on the net.)

This is why 2822 requires minimal quoting. The general principle, as
discussed in http://cr.yp.to/proto/design.html, is that (in the absence
of overriding concerns such as efficiency) there should be only one way
to encode each object.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago