Re: Mail addresses as URLs

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Tue, 11 May 1993 13:20:29 -0500

Thus wrote: John C Klensin
>>well defined concept of a mailbox which
>>may or may not contain documents and may or may not have
>>restricted access. Perhaps "mailbox:" would be better than "mailto:".
>>Moving a document into somone's mail box is just like moving a
>>file into a directory: it is an operation with pre- and
>>postconditions.

Presumably this is going to be specific to address formats of the
general form we all know and love, "smtp://cs.indiana.edu/mvanheyn"
seems to me the most consistent and unambiguous method for specifying
my mail address. I think calling something "mail" or "mailto" is
rather unclear, since the number of different ways to specify mail
routing and the like is greater than one. We already have silly
ambiguity with "file:" being both local file reference and FTP; let's
not do that again with mail.

--
Marc VanHeyningen   mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu   MIME & RIPEM accepted
GUIs are great at representing everything except relationships involving
the word "many".
		- Larry Wall