hi, Robert, > Back then there were actually very few genuine e-mail addr (or anything > else e-mail related) parsers - e-mail was simply text shown almost verbatim > to the user (with sometimes the ability to hide some of the header fields).
i wrote my b[atch]smtp parser, and it dealt with addresses by parsing both styles simultaneously until one failed, then switched to the other (it was kind of fun doing that) at Berkeley in early 80s. Eric Allman had already written sendmail, i think, which presumably parsed. i don't remember when/if ever the user programs on Unix started parsing more than "a string". cheers, Greg
