[Mailman-Developers] case-sensitive e-mail addresses

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 02 May 2001 08:26:59 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

> On 5/2/01 8:05 AM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
>> I'm afraid I must disagree: that section of 2821 implies that

> Sorry, I disagree. "may be" means the standard allows you to
> consider this as optional. That's good, because 821 made case
> sensistivity mandatory (and the switch shows the clear intent of
> the standards folks, which is moving to full case insensitivity,
> but they must have felt completely removing it was too big a step
> -- but they're telling anyone who might still have a case
> sensitive mailer it's time to fix it)

IIRC some of the old BitNet systems mandated case sensitive LHS and
were not configurable in that regard.  As a result the gateways
would upcase everything for portability.  Its questionable if any of
them are still on the 'net, but that's another question.

> In practice, Barry's approach is the best one. The only thing that
> happens if you practice case sensitivity on the user part is that
> users end up with multiple subscriptions, multiple copies and no
> clue how to fix it or what's wrong (and it's your fault, your
> mailer is screwed up).

The principle of least surprise.  People have enough problem with
case sensitive passwords.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--