On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 09:28:01AM -0400, John Stoffel wrote: > Exactly. And it doesn't scale. Even at my small 400-500 person > company we have conflicts with names. So, if you have two > john.sm...@foo.com, who gets the email? Riddle me that batman...
Years ago, I worked on a mail system that used an "intelligent" algorithm to convert first.l...@domain to the appropriate email address. It was particularly smart about misspellings, breaking it down into phonemes, so you could send mail to johnathon.billings and it'd get to me. If the mail system couldn't figure out who you were asking for, it would generate an SMTP failure with a list of possible matches in the error, so you'd get a bounce with useful information in it. This was a boon in the days when email sometimes took over a day to get from site to site, servers making calls late at night when it was cheap. A mis-spelled name could lead to several days wasted. Mail systems had to be built to be as flexible and helpful as possible. As time passed, this flexibility became an aid to spammers and difficult to support. Often, a professor would have business cards made out with their first.last email address. Then a new student would arrive (often, the professor's child) with the same name, and suddenly mail to that address would generate the bounce I mentioned before. We'd have to put in exceptions when that happened, and usually only AFTER the professor complained. Other than digging through logs, we didn't know what people were using as their email address. Mail systems don't have to be that flexible anymore. People rarely need to guess at people's email address, and recipients rarely want their email address to go out into spammer's lists. In-house, most places offer directories, either built in to email clients or a searchable web page. It doesn't matter what your email address is, because it's keyed to a larger directory entry that is easy to find. If you don't already have access to my email address (business card, previous email, etc.), and don't have access to the directory, for the most part, there's no reason you'd NEED to email me. -- Jonathan Billings <billi...@negate.org> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
