----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> If you're serious, the answer is that some people view that adherance
> to standards is important even if it seems to temporarily hamper
> interoperability. "Temporarily"? I'm talking the long-term view
> of the Internet not the next couple of years. Standards-rot over the
> last 20 years on the Internet has already caused serious problems and
> blithely ignoring them, no matter how vague, is a contributor to that
> standards-rot.
I'd just like to throw in a little comment, without disagreeing with you
outright, that CNAMEs are not 'prohibited' by any Internet Standards
documents (to my knowledge).
For those reading this who don't know, standards and rfcs are not
equivalent. HTTP, for example (as someone on this list's homepage points
out) is not a standard.
For the sake of answering the original questionner w.r.t. reasoning, from
RFC974 (which is standard 0014):
Note that the algorithm to delete irrelevant RRs breaks if LOCAL has
a alias and the alias is listed in the MX records for REMOTE. (E.g.
REMOTE has an MX of ALIAS, where ALIAS has a CNAME of LOCAL). This
can be avoided if aliases are never used in the data section of MX
RRs.
cf. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc974.html
This is the only mention of the non-use of CNAMEs in the mail standards.
