[80935] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Underscores in host names
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Finch)
Thu May 19 06:57:45 2005
Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 11:57:10 +0100
From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
To: Brad Knowles <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <p06200723beb20fda1517@[10.0.1.2]>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Thu, 19 May 2005, Brad Knowles wrote:
>
> Check Guinea-Bissau for .gw. This has been a source of heartburn for
> many years. Any site that has a mail gateway system and uses unqualified
> hostnames is at risk, because mail to "fred@gw" could legitimately be
> interpreted two different ways, and mail could be mis-directed.
>
> I did some consulting at a major wall street trading firm that had
> this problem, and the only reason we ever found out that something truly
> bizarre was going on was because we were getting back these bounces which we
> couldn't explain, because we knew for sure that the user portion was
> legitimate. Then we started looking closer at where the bounces were actually
> coming from.
This reminds me of the problems with JANET-order versus Internet-order
mail domains that caused some email for cl.cam.ac.uk to go via Chile.
Tony.
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