Re: ARIN Policy on IP-based Web Hosting

[Peter van Dijk <petervd () vuurwerk nl>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 02:26:20PM +1100, Andrew McNamara wrote:
> > > > Name-based virtual hosting does not work in many, MANY cases.
> > >
> > > And it doesn't work for POP3 at all.
> >
> > It can. Just give your users POP logins of the form
> > user () domain name.
>
> Just bear in mind the restriction in the POP3 RFC (1725) that limits
> arguments to commands to 40 characters.

RFC1725 is obsoleted by 1939, which indeed has the same limit.

1939, however, is updated by 2449, which moves the limit to 255
characters for a POP3 command line, leaving 248 chars for the username
(a little less with APOP).

> Also, if you have a lot of clients using legacy software, you will find
> that some old versions of software won't allow usernames including an
> '@' character, and other software enforces length limits of less than
> 40 characters.

Anybody doing user () domain name logins with POP3 is smart enough to
support other separators than @. Even current versions of Netscape strip
off all past and including the @ because it thinks the user is stupid
and entered his/her complete e-mail address instead of just a username.

40 characters also shouldn't be a real problem even if enforced, most
email-adresses fit under 40 chars.

I have never heard of anybody running into problems because of
length-enforcements on POP3-usernames, and I am on several mailinglist
relating to the subject (where other people use this trick too).

Greetz, Peter.
-- 
[ircoper]        petervd () vuurwerk nl - Peter van Dijk / Hardbeat
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