"A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks" by Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams (O'Reilly & Associates, 1993), Xerox Grapevine, DECNET.
The book tells about lots of different ways to present an email address. What i know of are Internet (user@host), UUCP (host!user) and DECNET (host::user) styles. What are the others? Any examples? Or where to find them?
Thanks in advance
When I was SA on 10 AT&T 3B2 systems, they used the BANG "!" in place of the AT "@". So a user's email address was: system!user
One caveat to this was there was no "DNS" back then and you had to know the route to the user's system. So when you sent an email, the "TO:" field looked something like this:
system4!system3!system2!system1!system!user
I know that form, it's UUCP, it was used with UNIX, and UNIX was property of AT&T. As fare as i can understand, it was time of Sendmail as the only MTA. Anyway, instead of always typing full routes email aliasing could be configured in system-wide alias file or user-own .mailrc file(s). System wide (/etc/aliases):
jimmi: host1!host2!host3!james
User-specific ($HOME/.mailrc):
alias jimmi host1!host2!host3!james
Mail forwarding could also be configured on central mail server, so that all the other hosts would be its clients in what has to do with email - all mail is submitted to the hub, and hub decides what mail goes to where and maintains all the aliases centrally. Of course, i don't know of your situation there, but that's how i imagine the solution of the problem with long routes.
The picture of 3B2-vme makes me recall of german MFA, it also had extension cards of such format.