Re: zmailer too restrictive

[Nicholas_Briggs.PARC@xerox.com]

I believe the intent of the "MUST NOT interpret or modify the "local-part" of
the address" statement is intended to prohibit "helpful" transformations that
might render an address generated by a gateway unrecognizable if it were
returned (e.g., % to bang-path rewrite, when the % wasn't intended that way)

If a system that is not SMTP based is doing a conversion from its internal
addresses in order to insert the address into an SMTP based system then it is
that software's responsibility to make sure that the conversion is done in a
manner consistent with the full RFC821 syntax, including the local-part.

For example, we have a system where a user might have a user name ending in a
period --  Joe Bob Jr. and if the gateway did a simple minded conversion of
space to underscore, it would end up with Joe_Bob_Jr.@xerox.com -- this is not
valid RFC821, so the gateway code has to be prepared, when necessary, to insert
quotes to produce "Joe Bob Jr."@xerox.com to keep it compliant (of course there
are other transformations it could choose, too).


					\nick