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 -)
- e
p.s there's another good reason for me: my address is e...@arix.com which
is too short for many sites... so I usually then use e
+siten...@arix.com which allows me to know, when I get spam at that
address, where my address was stolen from.