Subject: history of using a comment for display-name?

From: Sam Roberts <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 12:27:23 -0500

Does anybody know when the habit of using a comment after
the addr-spec started? It seems strange to me that
anybody would do that, when RFC 822 already had a way to
associate a phrase with an address.

Did the practice predate the rfc? It seems brain-damaged.

Sam

-- 
Sam Roberts <[email-masked]> (http://www.emyr.net/Sam)

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 07:45:17 +1100

>Did the practice predate the rfc? It seems brain-damaged.

RFC822 did not adequately describe name <address> as the required form.  I 
believe that sendmail started the practise of doing address (name).

d/

----------
Dave Crocker   <mailto:[email-masked]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking   <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel: +1.408.246.8253;   fax: +1.408.273.6464

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From: "Maynard Kang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 14:13:05 +0800

> believe that sendmail started the practise of doing address (name).

I think it did (section 6.1):
mailbox     =  addr-spec                    ; simple address
                 /  phrase route-addr            ; name & addr-spec
route-addr  =  "<" [route] addr-spec ">"

Additionally section 3.4.3 does state that comments must not be included
during protocol exchanges with mail servers.. and thus if I interpret it
correctly, sendmail is non-RFC822 compliant then.

maynard

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 08:30:33 -0500

> correctly, sendmail is non-RFC822 compliant then.

nope.  that's not what section 3.4.3 means.

in practice, comments were the "preferred form" of representing names
for many years after RFC 822 was published.  this was due to several
reasons:

- there were rumors of old mailers still in use that couldn't handle a 
  phrase before the address

- Usenet (RFC 1036) used comments, didn't support phrase, and gateways
  between mail and news were fairly common.

- many mailers could be configured to automatically add a name as a
  phrase but would not quote that name if it contained special 
  characters (most notably ".") - thus mailers configured to use
  phrase for name developed a reputation for producing badly
  formed messages. 

- people didn't update their old sendmail.cf files, thus use of
  comments for names remained quite common and thus seemed "normal".

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From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:14:29 +0700

Date:        Mon, 12 Mar 2001 07:45:17 +1100
    From:        Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | I believe that sendmail started the practise of doing address (name).

Definitely not sendmail, it predates that (perhaps delivermail, its
predecessor, but I suspect it may predate that as well).

It turns out to be much easier to use the comment form, inside a
comment, almost anything is legal, there isn't much need to syntax
check what is there.   In a phrase, there are quite strict syntax
requirements, anything else needs to be quoted.  The quotes can look
ugly (and more so when they only apply to some people's names, not
everyone's).

kre

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From: "Maynard Kang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 08:23:05 -0800

> nope.  that's not what section 3.4.3 means.

So what does it exactly mean then? Perhaps Dave would be the better person
to answer this. The way I interpret it is that comments should be shown
when the message is being read, but should not be used when the message is
being transmitted.

>   comments for names remained quite common and thus seemed "normal".

I guess as a developer of e-mail software I find it mildly irritating that
I've always had to write code to support both the "phrase route-addr" and
"addr-spec (comments)" formats in e-mail headers. You can imagine the
problem getting worse when dealing with non-ASCII in headers.. Some
non-compliant mail software just insert double-byte characters liberally
into the phrase component (and to make matters worse, quote the string, and
escape out other quotes within the string which may be part of a
double-byte character!)

This might be flogging a dead horse, but I think we should state, in any
update to RFC 822, that the "phrase route-addr" format MUST be supported
and that comments in addr-spec are NOT RECOMMENDED. It seems to me that the
problems you have described above are more or less legacy problems that
aren't so significant nowadays. Then again, I cannot be sure. Perhaps the
rest of the working group has additional comments.

maynard

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:38:59 -0500

> problem getting worse when dealing with non-ASCII in headers.. 

I have had the same irritation for mail software that I write
(even though it's not for public consumption, at least not yet)
I try to find a name in either the phrase or a following comment, 
and naturally I decode encoded-words.  I also try to deal with
extra quotes, untagged 8-bit characters (guessing whether they're
utf8, iso-2022-*, or something else), and phrases which are
entirely redundant with the address.

(so I translate each of the following:

"foo" <foo@domain> 
"'foo'" <foo@domain>
"foo@domain" <foo@domain>
"'foo@domain'" <foo@domain>

to simply 

<foo@domain>

it's a major pain, but the resulting display is a lot easier to read)

Most mail client these days seem to generate phrase rather than comment, 
but this doesn't help someone writing a new mail reader.  Mail readers
may have to deal with messages that are decades old, so they end up 
needing to understand old conventions long after they are no longer 
generated.  

Keith

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From: Eric Allman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 08:40:22 -0800

Robert and Keith are correct.  Remember, when sendmail (and delivermail)
appeared, the Internet didn't exist, and the network world had many more
users on UUCP than on ARPAnet/Internet (remember the "acceptable use
policy"?).  Far more mailers could handle ``address (name)'' than
``name <address>'', probably because the former syntax was already in
use on Usenet.

Couple this with the relatively strange restrictions on "." and "'" in
RFC-822 -- folks like Mike O'Dell and Almost Anyone Jr. had to quote
their full names, auto-quoting not being common in mailers at that time.

Clearly the Internet has won out over UUCP, which is why sendmail has
been using ``name <address>'' for about ten years now.

eric

============= In Reply To: ===========================================
: From:  Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
: Subject:  Re: history of using a comment for display-name? 
: Date:  Mon, 12 Mar 2001 08:30:33 -0500

: > Additionally section 3.4.3 does state that comments must not be included
: > during protocol exchanges with mail servers.. and thus if I interpret it
: > correctly, sendmail is non-RFC822 compliant then.
: 
: nope.  that's not what section 3.4.3 means.
: 
: in practice, comments were the "preferred form" of representing names
: for many years after RFC 822 was published.  this was due to several
: reasons:
: 
: - there were rumors of old mailers still in use that couldn't handle a 
:   phrase before the address
: 
: - Usenet (RFC 1036) used comments, didn't support phrase, and gateways
:   between mail and news were fairly common.
: 
: - many mailers could be configured to automatically add a name as a
:   phrase but would not quote that name if it contained special 
:   characters (most notably ".") - thus mailers configured to use
:   phrase for name developed a reputation for producing badly
:   formed messages. 
: 
: - people didn't update their old sendmail.cf files, thus use of
:   comments for names remained quite common and thus seemed "normal".
:

---

From: "Maynard Kang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 08:47:23 -0800

> rest of the working group has additional comments.

Hmm I just realised this is already in section 3.4 -09 of
draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt.

Apologies for my oversight.

maynard

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From: [email-masked] (Kai Henningsen)
Date: 16 Mar 2001 00:03:00 +0200

> believe that sendmail started the practise of doing address (name).

It looks like RFC 724 (12 May 1977, Pogran, Vittal, Crocker, Henderson)  
introduced both the phrase and the comment. (Neither are in 561, and 680  
is not online.) From the descriptions, it seems that the phrase was  
supposed to be meaningful to the MTA, whereas the examples for the comment  
show usage for human-readable names.

RFC 733 is already very much like 822, even though it still talks about  
FTP servers.

MfG Kai