>Let me know what you think of the following excerpt from a message send by
>someone who the autodelete removed from my list.
>
>>> I forwarded your original message to my provider. They had the same
>>> comment, that @ia.net is case sensitive. I exchange mail with another
>>> individual daily and there has been no problem.
>
>I tried to explain that this is not true, but have met with the same response.
>I can't believe that someone would have a server whose name is case sensitive
>and expect to function on the net. Ideas? Am I confused?
Consulting my handy copy of RFC 822, I see:
> 3.4.7. CASE INDEPENDENCE
>
> Except as noted, alphabetic strings may be represented in any
> combination of upper and lower case. The only syntactic units
> which requires preservation of case information are:
>
> - text
> - qtext
> - dtext
> - ctext
> - quoted-pair
> - local-part, except "Postmaster"
>
> When matching any other syntactic unit, case is to be ignored.
> For example, the field-names "From", "FROM", "from", and even
> "FroM" are semantically equal and should all be treated ident-
> ically.
>
> When generating these units, any mix of upper and lower case
> alphabetic characters may be used. The case shown in this
> specification is suggested for message-creating processes.
>
> Note: The reserved local-part address unit, "Postmaster", is
> an exception. When the value "Postmaster" is being
> interpreted, it must be accepted in any mixture of
> case, including "POSTMASTER", and "postmaster".
Within context, this means that the stuff before the @ sign can be
case-sensitive (except in the case of postmaster@whatever), but most other
stuff (including domain names) cannot.
So basically your lack of belief is correct; they're free, of course, not
to follow RFC822 if they don't want to, but they shouldn't be surprised if
there are problems when they attempt to interact with the outside world.
-jwgh
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