On Sep 25, 2009, at 2:30 PM, Wietse Venema wrote:
Erick Calder:
On Sep 25, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Wietse Venema wrote:
Erick Calder:
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 -)
It could be done. It would however be a pain to convert everything
from the current hard-coded assumption of a single delimiter, and
it would require an additional abstraction layer.
However when you increase the number of delimiters, you can also
increase the number of table lookups.
I don't think it would be so difficult. when the mail arrives, the
local part of the address gets scanned for a set of characters (easy
regex) and replaced with whatever postfix currently recognises as the
delimiter. this way as far as postfix is concerned, there is still
only 1 delimiter. of course, this assumes the user isn't going to
segregate mail based on the delimiters (but I think that's fine)
You can't replace the delimiter. That would break other people's
transit mail, among many things.
I'm not sure I understand... perhaps we're speaking of 2 different
things. what I mean is that when an e-mail first arrives at the
server, before it gets processed, it could be rewritten to use the
known delimiter i.e. a mail arriving for e/j...@arix.com could be
rewritten as e+j...@arix.com (since + is what postfix uses to delimit)
What if one address matches more than one element in your delimiter
set? How do you know which one the author of the email address
intended to use? Postfix would have to try each alternative with
its virtual alias, canonical etc. lookups.
take the first instance. that's how postfix does it, isn't that the
case?
