I had to delurk for this... Standardisation of email addresses. One of the good reasons behind RFC2142 seems to have been lost here. With the standard mailboxes specified, it ensures that when I email those email addresses, I can expect the emails to land in the mailbox of the people who are in charge of that particular task. Patrick O'brien did a search of the database and came up with the "username" statistics. That is fine that they don't use the standard addressing as they are specifying their own. The idea behind the standardised mailboxes is that if all else fails emailing that particular username should work. For example if someone in that datbase was named as joe(a)domainname.co.nz had left and the domain name didn't update it. SHould I wish to contact the technical contact (who was joe(a)domainname.co.nz) and it bounced because joe had left, I can then send it to postmaster or one of the other admin addresses. I often have to contact administrators regarding abuse like spam, DOS attacks etc. As long as I know the domain name, I don't have to think about it. I should be sure that if I emailed abuse(a)domainame, the email will get to the person who handles it. Whether abuse is an actual mailbox or an alias that points to someone else's mailbox or a .forward in some account is immaterial to me. It becomes a problem is we have to contact a domain's administrative contact and the email to abuse@ (or postmaster@ or soa@ etc) bounces and we have no other means of finding out the email address since finger does not work, there is no whois available for that country (or gtld), or no website for that domain. Only avenue is to traceroute and contact their upstream provider hoping that they will be able to forward that. This is why if people do know about RFC2142 and do try to adhere to the compulsory bits of it, it would make life easier for everyone. So in the case of domainz, I don't mind the 4service as long as the equivalent required username is also available. just my 2b worth Lin ps Oscar Abley's webpage http://patho.gen.nz/~oscar --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog