BUG: GnuPG Key import fails to parse TLD email address

[Rich Wales]

Florian Weimer wrote:

    > However, I suppose that the hierarchical namespace with few
    > roots was only starting to evolve during the early eighties.

Indeed.  I remember when our computers in the UCLA Computer Science
Department got their first hierarchical domain names; we took our
existing ARPANET node names and added ".ARPA" to the end.  Later,
we moved into the new ".EDU" domain (so, for example, UCLA-CS.ARPA
became CS.UCLA.EDU) -- and, of course, the only thing left in ".ARPA"
was (and still is) the IP-address-to-host-name reverse lookup domain,
IN-ADDR.ARPA.

One of the big hurdles people needed to deal with back then (kind of
related to this question of whether "ai" is a top-level domain or an
unqualified local host) was how to handle British domain names in the
JANET network, which were written "backwards" (top level first).  The
mail relays tried their best to detect names that needed rewriting as
they traversed the pond, but confusion still arose on occasion.  For
example, was a domain name ending in ".CS" a backwards name for some
British university's computer science department, or was it some site
in Czechoslovakia?  The problem resolved itself, of course, when the
British sites finally changed their naming convention and Czechoslo-
vakia obligingly split in two. :-}

Rich Wales       richw at webcom.com       http://www.webcom.com/richw/pgp/
GnuPG: ID 0xD5B31B96, print 192B7D91 3050E92B 3FC0FAB1 8C01D8CA D5B31B96