Subject: Interoperability warning

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 6 Jun 1999 15:45:33 -0000

Michael Wang reports that Sun's mailx barfs on bracketed addresses
without preceding phrases.

New implementors will want to know this. Otherwise they may be tempted
to bracket everything, not realizing that doing so will produce serious
interoperability problems.

I propose adding an appropriate warning to 822bis:

   Beware that some implementations incorrectly require a display-name
   in any name-addr. Message creators can use addr-spec instead of
   name-addr when no display-name is available.

---Dan

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 06 Jun 1999 12:11:47 -0400

> without preceding phrases.

Of course, this was conforming behavior prior to RFC1123.   Not to defend Sun
here, but just to note that some changes take a long time to propagate.
 
>...l

I tend to agree that some warning would be desirable.   The warning text  might
put this into context by noting that bare bracketed text  has been permitted
since <whenever 1123 came out> but that there may be never-updated server
implementations out there.  As in other cases, the existence of a
non-conforming implementation should not drive the standard toward a minimal
common (including the brokenness) base.  That way lies a world in which the
standard functional set can only get worse, never better.

    john