nanog mailing list archives

Re: Underscores in host names


From: Tony Finch <dot () dotat at>
Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 11:57:10 +0100


On Thu, 19 May 2005, Brad Knowles wrote:

      Check Guinea-Bissau for .gw.  This has been a source of heartburn for
many years.  Any site that has a mail gateway system and uses unqualified
hostnames is at risk, because mail to "fred@gw" could legitimately be
interpreted two different ways, and mail could be mis-directed.

      I did some consulting at a major wall street trading firm that had
this problem, and the only reason we ever found out that something truly
bizarre was going on was because we were getting back these bounces which we
couldn't explain, because we knew for sure that the user portion was
legitimate.  Then we started looking closer at where the bounces were actually
coming from.

This reminds me of the problems with JANET-order versus Internet-order
mail domains that caused some email for cl.cam.ac.uk to go via Chile.

Tony.
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