[LINK] Why www.etc?
Paul Brooks
pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au
Fri Dec 7 10:59:21 AEDT 2007
Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 10:52 AM 6/12/2007, Glen Turner wrote:
>> gdt at its -- if the sender was in the University of Adelaide
>> and this was seen as an advantage in an age where e-mail addresses were
>> typed.
>
> This approach to email also mimics real mail. It made it quite easy
> for me to teach people how to conceptually construct one. Doesn't mean
> they got them typed correctly as there is no standard except for the
> @, country code, and the top level domain. Every other component can
> be almost anything that avoid the set of special characters. Even the
> @ I believe can be substituted with +. I just learned that recently
> when setting up a new email account, but that may not be universal.
>
> Jan
The '+' is a fairly recent development used only within the Cpanel
webhosting system as far as I know.
Use of the alternative character '%' dates back to the 1970s/1980s when
some form of user-specified routing to relay gateways between different
(non-RFC-821) email systems like BITNET, UUCP, ACSNET was required -
'user%host1 at gateway.internetdomain' meant 'send the message to the host
'gateway.internetdomain' first, which will understand how to gateway the
message into the non-RFC882 email system and deliver to 'user%host' in
the other email system. Possibly the gateway would replace the '%' with
a '@' on the way through if the second email system was also using
Internet-style addresses.
This style of manual routing can still work today, but is usually
blocked by anti-third-party-relaying rules introduced to block spam.
Back in the dark mists of time before the DNS, UUCP email was routed
specifying the path using '!' as the separator - to get to user 'grg'
the syntax was 'utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!ihnss!ihuxp!grg',
assuming you were logged into host 'utzoo' at the time. In this system
you had to specify the host closest to you, then the next closest, and
so on, which made things fairly short if you were trying to reach
someone within your department or institution - and in the old days, the
80/20 rule of local/long-distance ratios applied - the majority of email
was to people within your own organisation. (Possibly this was
self-fulfulling - sending an email to someone a long way away in network
topology terms was so fraught with uncertainty that many were turned off
trying!)
http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ew_addr.htm provides a fairly concise
summary of the history (and the example above).
A little bit of trawling found a list of old email addresses that
demonstrates almost every conceivable combination of these forms at
http://www.netlib.org/misc/groups
including gems like "mfci!fisher%uucp"@yale.arpa and
"munnari!uacomsci.ua.oz!elhay"@uunet.uu.net who was one of my CompSci
lecturers at Adelaide Uni.
Regards,
Paul.
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