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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.mail
Subject: Re: Is uppercase allowed in a site name on Usenet/Eunet?
Message-ID: <1011@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 24-Feb-84 15:46:32 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.1011
Posted: Fri Feb 24 15:46:32 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Feb-84 07:57:11 EST
References: <142@west44.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 24

Upper or mixed case UUCP site names are discouraged.  The reasons
are that (1) 4.1BSD's delivermail squashes everything to lower
case, and if the system is called Shasta, it won't be able to
figure out where to send mail addressed to shasta; (2) people
are easily confused and tend to reproduce case differences
incorrectly; (3) RFC822 specifies that upper and lower case are
supposed to be the same, that is, case is ignored in host names.

There are some sites currently using upper case UUCP host names.
Here is a list of those I know about:
	AT2a Ciprnet D1355 Fnatte-Vax GESS GLOBE GWII Glacier
	IM60 MAC001 NW1 ODA3B ODA3b Olympus PWB1 SW1A Shasta
	VisiVax WE9unix WIN
All of these sites have trouble getting mail.

There will shortly be a UUCP site name registry.  The conventions
it will allow are as follows:
	The first 6 characters must be unique
	lower case letters, digits, dash, and underline allowed
In general, upper case may be used as long as measures are taken
to ensure that the lower cased version of the name will also work.
Such measures are quite difficult, so upper case is a bad idea.

	Mark Horton