[180] in Moira
Re: [pvg@ATHENA.MIT.EDU: vax 7.1H: chpobox]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jerome H Saltzer)
Wed Oct 17 21:55:27 1990
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 90 21:54:30 EDT
To: Mark Rosenstein <mar@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: Mark Rosenstein <mar@mit.edu>'s message of Wed, 17 Oct 90 17:58:30 -0400
From: Jerome H Saltzer <Saltzer@mit.edu>
Cc: bug-moira@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
> Your mailer shouldn't care if you login name is in uppercase or not.
> RFC822 (the standard for internet mail) specifies this.
Mark,
As a case-preservation fanatic, I can't let that one slip by.
My copy of RFC822 (it is dated August 13, 1982--has it been amended
since?) in Section 3.4.7 specifies that all fields are to be
case-insensitive except for a short list of specific items that
"require preservation of case information". The short list includes
the local-part of addresses except for the address "Postmaster",
which is required to be case-insensitive.
It is hard to require anything different, because local-part is for
convenience usually made congruent to the person's login id, and the
allowable syntax for a login id is specified by each system on its
own.
Whether or not it is silly for systems to have case-sensitive login
id's is a different question. They got that way because in the early
days (UNIX inherited this bug from Multics), we confused
case-preserving with case-sensitive, and we implemented the latter
when we really wanted the former. The proper human-engineered
interface is that mail/login id's (and also file names) should be
case-preserving, so that names and ID's always display the way people
like to see them, but that all comparisons of those names should be
be case-insensitive, so that people don't make mistakes in matching.
Jerry
