>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