Re: Protection of hyphen

--On Tuesday, 22 April, 2003 21:35 -0400 Martin Duerst 
<[email protected]> wrote:

>
> At 12:27 03/04/22 +0100, Roy Badami wrote:
>
>
>>  > Note that "owner-listname" is a prime example of why we
>>  > might *not* want to protect the hyphen. The hyphen in that
>>  > name is not for making subaddresses: it is just there for
>>  > preventing the two names from smooshing together.
>>
>> But some software (eg sendmail) has special knowledge of the
>> owner-listname construct.
>>
>> I wonder how much mailing list management software has things
>> like owner-listname or listname-request hardwired?  (Note:
>> I'm not saying that this is a big problem in practice; I'm
>> just posing the question.)
>>
>> Also hyphen is the default delimiter for subaddressing in
>> qmail (though this is easily changed, so may not matter so
>> much).
>
> Can it be changed on a per-installation basis, or on a per-user
> basis, or on a per-main-address basis? Can it be changed by the
> user, or does it need system priviledges?
>
> If we need a sysadmin to change it, and it applies to all users
> and all existing and future addresses, then this is a serious
> problem. If each user can change it, per address (many users
> will want to have both a traditional ASCII address and an
> IMA), then that's probably okay.

Martin,

It is wired into code in many places, i.e., not even the 
sysadmin can change it without obtaining source and recompiling. 
In many systems, establishing a mail alias (whether for a list 
or something else) and its definition are necessarily a sysadmin 
function, since such addresses are essentially equivalent to 
local-system accounts -- while different lists could, in 
principle, have different conventions, differences in 
conventions drive sysadmins crazy and are unlikely to be adopted 
unless there is compelling need.  Similarly, the 
listname-request convention is all over the network.  It is one 
of our oldest naming conventions -- certainly predating 
firstname.lastname, initial_lastname, and even ftp.foo.bar. 
Worse, both the owner-listname (and listname-owner) strings are 
processed by things that are not strictly MTAs (in the narrow 
definition of being at one side or the other of SMTP 
transactions).  They are, instead, embedded in user's minds, 
macro functions in address books, server-side (e.g., SIEVE, 
procmail, and dozens of arrangements for which there has been no 
attempt at standardization) and client-side mail-filtering 
subsystems.

In some of these cases, the local parts will have been decoded 
from (or to) the ACE forms outside the processing that will need 
to interpret the convention and, hence, it just won't make any 
difference.  But, to the extent that any of these things are 
handled as MTA functions -- either the relevant strings and 
delimiters will need to be "protected", or the MTAs will need to 
be hacked up sufficiently that the advantages of an MUA-based 
system will largely disappear.

regards,
    john