On Sat, 9 Aug 1997 11:56:22 -0400 Russ <[log in to unmask]> said:

>My point,  the routines should be  able to accept an  address exactly as
>any of the other routines might return it.

It's not  that simple. Addresses  are displayed using the  RFC822 mailbox
format, which is  the way all mail programs are  supposed to display them
and the format  that people will be expecting because  in theory everyone
has to use it. In some tricky cases this format looks weird per the rules
in RFC822,  and I  don't think  it would be  appropriate for  LISTSERV to
invent its own non-compliant display format for this. The input format is
different in these  tricky cases because the commands are  based on blank
separated  parameters, not  on the  RFC822  format where  white space  is
allowed just  about everywhere  and you  know the  extent of  the address
portion advance  (ie you  don't have to  decide "this is  the end  of the
address and the beginning of the rest of the command"). Another reason is
that   the  RFC822   quoting  rules   are   known  to   be  obscure   and
counter-intuitive  and are  not  a good  model to  use  for your  command
parser.  Let's just  say  many mail  products got  it  wrong because  the
developers could  not understand  them :-) Only  ADD supports  this input
format, for convenience (and because it knows that the whole command line
is a  mailbox + name).  LISTSERV uses a  simpler system for  command line
arguments where  you enclose things  in quotation marks and  there aren't
2000 sub-rules.  If you don't want  to learn this escaping  sequence, you
can use wildcards, which also saves typing.

  Eric