My reasons for including it seem very similar to why you are against
it...
My take on it is this:
The majority of email clients that support LDAP use, *by default*, the
"mail" attribute when writing the address of an unqualified recipient
(i.e. no @host-part).
Because I need to route mail with these addresses, I will always need
to check this attribute where these clients exist (read: most any
enterprise solution).
Since mail=rlmorgan@washington.edu exists for dc=stanford,dc=com (or
what ever you set the base dn to), I would expect to consider that
attribute for mail routing purposes. *However* since washington.edu !=
a domain under the stanford.edu athority, the lookup would never
actually occur, so your example would not present a problem.
Randall
On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:
: On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Gregory Neil Shapiro wrote:
:
: > Should we use the 'mail' attribute for routing or leave it as a
: > whitepages entry?
:
: My opinion, which I hold as strongly as it is possible for me to hold an
: opinion, is that the "mail" attribute must not be used for routing. In
: fact I think there is a deep pit of conceptual error that shows up in many
: areas, not just email, caused by confusing attributes about people with
: attributes about named service participants (aka accounts); but that's a
: longer rant.
:
: A current situation of mine illustrates the point. I worked at Stanford
: for many years and still have a DS entry there, as an "affiliate". I
: still receive email there (ie, you can send to "morgan@stanford.edu" and
: it goes to a Stanford-local mailbox), and want to continue doing so for
: various reasons (Stanford-local mailing lists, etc). But since I now
: prefer to receive email at my new workplace, I want my Stanford whitepages
: entry to reflect that, hence it says:
:
: Name: RL "Bob" Morgan
: Email: rlmorgan@washington.edu
: Relationship: Affiliate
: Profile: Now working at University of Washington
:
: Because the Stanford directory-based email routing system uses different
: (locally-defined) attributes, both to identify the "morgan@stanford.edu"
: mailbox and to hold its routing info, I'm free to set my "mail" attribute
: as it shows above without affecting the operation of my email account.
:
: To me the only sensible use of the "mail" attribute in a *person entry is
: as the answer to the question: "if I want to send email to the person
: whose entry this is, what do I put in the To: field?" Using it for any
: other purpose restricts people's ability to put what they want in that
: field. Sites may choose to constrain what people can put in the "mail"
: attribute, ie to require it to be their local email account, and that's a
: fine policy, but it shouldn't be baked into the routing mechanism.
:
: - RL "Bob"
:
:
:
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Oct 24 2002 - 10:31:46 PDT