Re: ICANN to allow commercial gTLDs

["John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

> > do you want to issue a RFC that bans search lists?
>
> Personally, I think search lists are a mistake and don't use them.

You're in good company.  It's hard to find a modern mail system that
allows abbreviated domain names in addresses.  I just checked the mail
at AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, and the one at Tucows which is used
by a lot of large corporate mail systems, and none of them will let
you send a message to an address like foo@bar.  Note that Yahoo and
Hotmail each handle mail for many large ISPs.

There's a lot of advice that made sense in 1989 which is irrelevant
now.  Programming around mail systems that rewrite partially qualified
addresses is in that category.  It may not be possible for people to
send mail to addresses like n@ai, but that's a very different problem
from it going to the wrong place.

R's,
John