Whap/Internet
Karl,
"Like, what's RFC and DNS? <grin>"
Oops! 🙂 Here and I was assuming (hah!) that since you were on the
Internet, you already knew the jargon! Sorry about that.
Anyway, DNS stands for Domain Name Service (or Server). A Domain
Name is an email address that obeys the Internet email protocols. The
Service/Server part comes from certain machines that are on the net which
will provide a kind of routing service. (I'm kinda fuzzy on that latter
part; the sites I've used have always used DNS addresses internally
already, so I've never had to use a DNS server.)
RFC stands for Request For Comment. An RFC is as close to an
official standard as the Internet gets. I think there's over 1500 of them
by now. They cover everything from the structure of the TCP/IP packets, to
the format of the headers of netnews and email messages. (Did you know
that if a news header is blank, that the last character is acutally a
space, not the colon? Yup. So instead of "Subject:", it's actually
"Subject: ". This sort of thing can cause trouble, and actually has in the
past.)
One of the tenets of netnews is "be forgiving in what you recieve,
and conservative in what you send". Hopefully, AutoPilot will be more
forgiving of some of the vaguaries of email headers (including
CompuServe's).
–dds Whappeta-whappeta-Whap!