Re: quick & dirty alternate addresses

Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email protected]> wrote:

> > MUAs already allow people to set the display-names for themselves
> > and for recipients.
>
> Sure.  But to use them as addresses, I have to write real parsing
> code.

Why would a software agent want to use one of the alternate addresses?
It can just use the real angle-addr (as it always has), and treat the
display-name as an opaque string to display to the user (as it always
has).  It's only humans who might have trouble using the angle-addr
(because it might be hard to remember), and thus it's only humans who
need to be able to see the addresses in the display-name, so that if
they ever need to recall an address, they'll have an easier one to
remember.

One of the selling points of the display-name approach was that it would
work in existing MUAs.  But that was assuming that they wouldn't choke
on long display-names, which unfortunately seems not to be the case.

AMC