| Subject: | Mulligroup Email Newsletter - Spam Survey |
|---|---|
| Date: | Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:22:28 +1000 |
| From: | Mulligroup <mulligroup@miltonulladulla.com> |
| Reply-To: | mulligroup@miltonulladulla.com |
| Organization: | Mulligroup |
| To: | mulligroup@miltonulladulla.com |
Recently we had a heat wave in California. My air conditioner broke because, I assume, it is not designed to operate in hot weather. That was the bad news. The good news is that I solved the problems in the Middle East. Allow me to explain.
During the several days that it was 112 degrees and I had no AC, all I wanted to do was build an IED and kill the AC guy who kept driving right past my office and helping other people. In fact, I wanted to kill everyone who didn’t agree with me on just about any point whatsoever.
And I realized that the problem with the Middle East is insufficient AC. If you think about it, virtually all of the organized violence in the world is originating from places where they have poor air conditioning. And in the desert, 112 degrees is considered a pleasant day. Imagine how grumpy you would be at 125 degrees. And guess what I never see on TV when they show footage of the Middle East?
Shade.
Every frickin’ person they interview in the Middle East is standing directly in the sun. Some shade would be a good step toward world peace.
When it’s 125 degrees outside, given the choice of sitting inside a one-room hovel with seventeen unwashed relatives versus launching rockets at Israel, the terrorist option starts looking mighty appealing. Because you know what else I never see on TV when they show footage of the Middle East?
Hobbies.
And I understand that. Most hobbies involve one of these things:
1. Glue (it would melt)
2. Spending money (they don’t have any)
3. Being outside (it’s 125 degrees)
At room temperature, you could never convince me to strap explosives to my body and walk into a crowded hotel lobby. But at 125 degrees, I’d welcome the change of pace.
Just out of curiosity, I would love to see a graph showing a comparison of temperature and terror/civil unrest. I’ll bet it’s a strong correlation.
The Swiss think they are all superior because they stay out of wars. I think they’re just lucky that they’re freezing their chocolate covered nuts.
Ads make Office Watch possible, please support our sponsors How to advertise click here
A simple question – what characters can you put in an email address? Like many things to do with the Internet the answer isn't as simple or direct as you might think.
In this issue we'll look at what makes a valid email address, both in theory and in practice.
For daily use you don't need to know. If you simply copy the email address as you're given it, you should be OK.
But knowing a bit more about email addressing can help you work out if an email address is incorrect or identify why it doesn't work. Developers and programmers might be surprised to discover that their carefully written web pages or code aren't entirely correct.
Which of these email address (all fake) is formatted correctly?
"Frederick Dagg"@freddagg.com
Fred*Dagg=funny@freddagg.com
FredO'Dagg@freddagg.com
The answer is that they are all strictly valid though they might not be useable in practice.
Knowing a bit more about email addresses may well interested many readers of 'Email Essentials' who, like us, get intrigued by these details. In keeping with the 'Essentials' part of our name, this is by no means a comprehensive look at email address formatting. We've provided links to the various RFC specification documents if you're interested in the minutiae.
There are two parts to an email address – the 'Local Part' and the Domain – which are separated by the famous @ symbol.
For example fred@freddagg.com has 'fred' as the local part and 'freddagg.com' as the domain.
Historical note: back at the start of the internet, Ray Tomlinson developed the first simple email system to work between computers. He's the guy who chose the @ symbol to separate the name and domain name.
The two parts of an email address have different rules about what is permitted. Domains are much more limited than local parts.
A domain name can contain letters, digits and hyphens only, up to a maximum of 255 characters.
Each part of a domain name is separated by the . (aka dot, fullstop or period).
Domain naming is a whole article on its own – suffice it to say what we're used to domains like .com .edu etc but there are also country domain suffixes (Top Level Domains TLD's) like .au .uk and .us right down to obscure ones like .hm (for the usually uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands). See http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm for a full list.
There's no consistency about domain suffixes. The commercial domain name is a good example. In the US it's .com as we all know. Australia clones that for .com.au but the UK uses .co.uk and New Zealand follows suit with .co.nz .
That's pretty straight-forward, the surprises come when you look at the part before the @ symbol …
Back in 1982 an Internet standard for email addresses was formalized called "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages" which goes under the catchy name of RFC 822 and it's this standard that most email systems obey.
There was an update to that in April 2001 called 'Internet Message Format' known as RFC 2822 .
According to RFC 2822 the local part of an email address can contain any of the following characters.
It's this last point which might surprise some people – most might think that an email address using one of these non-alphanumeric characters is 'illegal' but it's not. That said, it's quite possible that one of these 'extra' characters will not be accepted by a system.
Other characters (including spaces) are also permitted if included within double quote marks. For example Bruce Bayliss@freddagg.com is not permitted but "Bruce Bayliss"@freddagg.com is permitted (though it might not be accepted by a lot of software and is definitely NOT recommended).
An email address might be 'legal' but that doesn't necessarily mean that software will accept it. We're not just talking about email software – email addresses are often used as identification or login so those systems should check and accept the full range of valid characters. As we were preparing this issue we noticed that Microsoft Word did not recognize all the sample email addresses as such.
Shame file: this article was prompted, in part, when we discovered our own online store wasn't properly configured. It turns out that the store code we purchased didn't comply with RFC 2822, though it's taken 18 months or more to strike an email address which broke the system. And yes, our programmers are working on a fix as I type this.
Even Google's Gmail doesn't fully obey the email specification in one important way. A period '.' can be used within a local part and it won't change the mailbox destination. For example fre.dagg@gmail.com fred.agg@gmail.com and even f.r.e.d.a.g.g@gmail.com will all arrive at the mailbox of fredagg@gmail.com . This is unlike almost any other mail system which would consider each of those addresses to be quite different.
The plus sign + is a special case and can be used for tricky purposes on some email systems. We'll cover that in a future issue.
The local part can be up to 64 characters, much less than the domain part at 255 characters
That means the maximum email address length is Local Part plus @ plus domain or 64 + 1 + 255 = 320 characters.
An email address of anything approaching 320 characters is rare, but it probably will come as an unwelcome surprise to programmers who have assumed a much shorter length in their databases.
Even the standard maximum 255 character text field isn't sufficient, in theory. We looked at an Access sample database from Microsoft which only allows 50 characters in total for an email field.
As with many things about Internet specifications, there's a gap between what is permitted and what is supported. Shorter email addresses are better for various reasons but developers might want to consider accommodating longer strings (for structural convenience probably 255 characters).
According to RFC 2821 (the related SMTP specification), email addresses should be case-sensitive (ie FRED@ , Fred@ and fred@ are three different email prefixes).
However, even the specification notes that this is to be discouraged. In practice email addresses should be case INsensitive – thought there are rare cases when some receiving systems make the case distinction (usually this is a programming oversight).
All these suggestions, rules and RFC's are all well and good but as we've seen there is no firm laws that everyone has to obey. There's no point setting up an email address which some people won't be able to use.
We love to hear from our readers. Feel free to write to us with your experiences, questions, gripes and loves about all things email. Send mail to talkemail@office-watch.com - All messages are kept confidential. We regret that the volume of mail and the limit of 24 hours in each day mean that, much as we'd love to, we cannot reply to individual messages.
Editor-in-Chief: Peter Deegan
Copyright (c) 2006 Office Watch. All rights reserved. ISSN 1448-8655
Advertising: Advertising is available at reasonable rates ask Jan, our Advertising Manager for detail.
------------------------
Incredible story about an elephant's memory A young man was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from college. While he was walking through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed so the man approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant's foot. There was a large thorn deeply embedded in the bottom of the foot. As carefully and as gently as he could he worked the thorn out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man and with a rather stern look on its face, stared at him. For a good ten minutes the man stood frozen thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned and walked away. The man never forgot that elephant or the events of that day. Twenty years later the man was walking through the zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to where they are standing at the rail. The large bull elephant stared at him and lifted it's front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times, all the while staring at the man. The man couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant. After a while it trumpeted loudly; then it continued to stare at him. The man summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. Suddenly the elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of the man's legs and swung him wildly back and forth along the railing, killing him. Probably wasn't the same elephant.
Dear Matt,
Hope you had a great week.
Thank you for the email some thing interesting to look forward to next month with this new system.
I’ll have a V8 any time!!!
I was wondering if anyone within the club has updated to the new Internet Explorer 7BETA 3
I did a couple of days ago they have some new features which I found helpful specially all of you out there that deal with Ebay.
Maybe something to talk about at our next meeting!!!
Have a great week end
| I have a Labrador & I was buying a large bag of Meaty-bites at Coles and > was in line to check out. > > A woman behind me asked if I had a dog. On impulse, I told her that no, > I was starting The Meaty-bites Diet again, although I probably shouldn't > because I'd ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 20 kgs > before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of > most of my orifices and IVs in both arms. > > I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that > it works is to load your pants pockets with Meaty-bites nuggets and > simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is > nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again. > > I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now > enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her. > Horrified, she asked if I'd ended up in the hospital in that condition > because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I'd been > sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me. > > I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so > hard as he staggered out the door....... > > > . |
