where does +detail come from?

[Jeff Macdonald]

On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 11:02, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 10:55:20AM -0500, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> > =>Does anyone have any more specific information than that?
> > 
> > AFAIK it's not a thingy that was slipped in. It really is a standard part 
> > of the email addressing scheme. It's possible to disable it but why would 
> > you?
> 
> No, I'm pretty sure that's not true.  IIRC RFC 822 (and its bastard
> step-cousins) only say that what is on the left side of the '@' is up
> to the individual implementation.  I'm also pretty sure that some
> other MTAs (either postfix and/or qmail) use a '-' instead of a '+' to
> implement this feature, making it at least non-standard in practice.
> 
> As usual, I'm too lazy to look up the details, so  this is all from
> memory which is known to have bad transistors.  Therefore I disclaim
> all waranties implied or otherwise, and all that jazz...  ;-)

My Bat book says support was added in sendmail 8.7. I've always thought
it was a sendmail specific thing. It is most annoying when sign up forms
don't allow + as I use it as a way to tag my address with a vendor's
name (ie jeff+palm at blah for Palm). If mail comes from somewhere besides
the vendor - well, then you know he sold your address.