The German language is case sensitive. Here is an example:

"Mit scharfen Worten verurteilte das russische Aussenministerium die jüngsten Bombenangriffe britischer und amerikanischer Flugzeuge auf Ziele in der irakischen Flugverbotszone."

As you can see, there are a lot of capital letters in the middle of the sentence (none are names of people or places). All adjectives can be used as nouns; when this is the case, they are written with a capital letter to differentiate them from the adjective form. Most people find this very irritating when learning German, and often forget to add the capitals. Germans, in turn, get really annoyed if you do not use the right capitalization, even though they will understand perfectly almost every time.

Personally, I do not like this, for the simple reason that Aussen and aussen sound exactly the same when spoken out loud. But I did not make the rules, and these particular rules are too well established for my opinion to make any difference in the matter. Luckily I can only read German (mostly!), not write it, so I don't have to worry about forgetting to hit the shift key ;-)

If one day I learn enough German to be able to write in this language, I will of course follow the proper rules, even though I disagree with them. On the other hand, I would be really annoyed if I made the effort of writing in German to someone and that person unceremoniously bounced the message back to me saying that I should fix my capitalization if I want him to read my message. But this does not mean that I can dispense with the effort of hitting shift when appropriate.

This is all common sense of course, and you will find that a lot of the practices in the computer industry stem from common sense. Even though standards and historical restrictions often make very limited sense, people, when faces with these restrictions, will usually apply common sense to find a solution. This is why LISTSERV tries to avoid duplicate subscriptions and give a warning whenever a duplicate was detected but could not be avoided, and why there is now a new option to enable duplicate suppression either at the server level or on a per-list basis. This is also why the ISPs will go over their entire directory looking for a case insensitive match (which can take substantially more resources than directly opening the mailbox) when the capitalization is incorrect. But the rules were already 4 year old when I wrote LISTSERV and I could not reverse them.

  Eric