Quoth Philip Hazel on Thu, Feb 06, 2003:
> This requirement was carried out by some MTAs, and ignored by others. It
> has been dropped in 2821; there is no longer any mention of "canonical"
> names.
But there's no mention of the change either.
> > Honestly, it seems to me like a brain-dead idea pulled out of a bodily
> > orifice not normally mentioned in polite circles, but I'm prepared to
> > be shown the light if I'm mistaken.
>
> It was felt to be a good idea at the time. People were thinking in terms
> of individual hosts and their (single) email domain. CNAMEs were
> intended just to be alternative names for the same thing.
Makes sense. Still, routing by rewriting seems like a bad idea.
And I seem to recall that Sendmail used to treat aliases as local
domains anyway; when we migrated to Exim, we realized pretty fast
that we had more aliases than we knew. One would imagine it was
a common practice at that time (1997), Sendmail being the de
facto standard.
> All the virtual stuff came later.
Indeed.
Thanks,
Vadik.
--
Holy resolution for a holy war: the Torah stores most numbers as
little-endian (e.g. "seven and twenty and a hundred years")!
-- Eli Cherniavsky