# Re: Mailserver URL proposal

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:00:05 -0500

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    From: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>

    To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

    Subject: Re: Mailserver URL proposal

    In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 21 Jul 1994 15:37:44 PDT."

                 <94Jul21.153755pdt.2760@golden.parc.xerox.com>

    Date: Fri, 22 Jul 1994 14:00:05 -0500

    Message-Id: <28727.774903605@moose.cs.indiana.edu>

Thus wrote: Larry Masinter
>a) Is it vaguely possible to extend 'mailto:' to cover both its
>current interpretation and also the mailserver case?

This seems reasonable to me...

>I'm actually not at all certain that the mailserver case should follow
>the generic 'login' syntax; the host names in mail addresses are MX
>hostnames, not A records, and the rules about connectivity and proxy
>and etc. are all different.
>
>Why not just have:
> mailto:president@whitehouse.gov
>mean:
> send mail to president@whitehouse.gov
>
>while:
> mailto:president@whitehouse.gov/dear%20bill/Greetings%20from%20a%20web%20us
>er.

One would like to see something a little more general as far as
headers go, but something like that should work.

>b) Is it vaguely possible to extend 'telnet:' URLs to cover some
>initial material to send to the telnet connection?
>
> telnet://lambda.parc.xerox.com:8888/connect%20guest
>
>means 'telnet to lambda.parc.xerox.com port 888 and type 'connect
>guest'?

Modulo obvious security concerns, of course. :-) Ideally you want to
be able to negotiate an arbitrarily complex interactive session the
way you can with expect. Using an expect-enhanced version of Safe-Tcl
with the URL pointing to the program is probably a better way to do
this, though.

A generic request-response URL also could be of some use for handling
generic, simple services like whois and finger; not sure what to name
it, so I'll call it "foo". Something like

foo://whois.host:43/smith,john
foo://some.host:79/jsumer%20%2FW

would be "whois" and "finger" queries respectively. This, too, has
significant security concerns, though it doesn't really give any
functionality that it's already possible through kludging the "gopher"
URL.

- Marc

    --
    <A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html">Marc VanHeyningen</A>

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