At 06:00 PM 8/5/97 -0700, Anita Cohen-Williams wrote:
>I know that Web addresses are case sensitive. Are some e-mail addresses case
>sensitive as well?

Maybe you won't believe this, but stuff to the RIGHT of the "@" is
required to be case-insensitive, but stuff to the LEFT of the "@"
is up to the site as to what it means.

Just to complicate matters, though, "PoStMaStEr@..." is supposed
to work in all mixes of case.

Listserv doesn't apparently retain the distinction, so if you
have two distinct users [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask], they'll
have some trouble keeping themselves straight... something
I discovered when trying to get multiple subscriptions to addresses
such as "sTanr@..." and "stANr@..." -- since they all map to *ME*
at my particular ISP, I thought I could use that trick to get
myself a regular subscription, plus an index subscription and
a digest subscription but nope, didn't work right.

Probably well over 99% of the email world is case-insensitive to
the left of the "@" as well, so if you need to guess, then that
would be the best assumption.

Oh, and the case sensitivity you may perceive on the web is
probably due to file names on a UNIX system.  Files on other
types of systems (such as Windows NT) may not be case sensitive.
I don't think that an RFC requires anything either way for web
pages (though, having said that, someone is about to prove me
wrong I'm sure!  :)

Cheers,
Stan