Hello Bj”rn,

On Monday June 25 2018 09:54, you wrote to Paul Quinn:

 PQ>> You probably missed the memo.  There hasn't been any such danger
 PQ>> for quite some time.  The last active analogue modem in all of Z3
 PQ>> is in a locked perspex display box, at the residence of his
 PQ>> excellency the Z3C.

 BF>    LOL! I guess that settles it for good.  8-)

No, it does not.

My POV is that entering anything other than -Unpublished- or a valid dialable
number that connects to a modem is a bad idea. Why? Because classic POTS
mailers were designed under that assumption.

All (AFAIK) classic mailers POTS had the option of using translation tables to
add or truncate dialling prefixes and such. In general they were flexible
enough to translate any phone number into any other phone number.

But... there was no option to not dial certain numbers at all. My POTS mailer,
InterMail, had no documented way to tell it to never attempt to dial numbers
starting with 000-. Yes, I know your beloved FrontDoor had that option, but my
InterMail did not. You can argue that therefore Frontdoor classifies as a
"decent" mailer and my InterMail did not, but that does not alter the fact that
there were and probably still are classic POTS mailers around that can not
properly deal with 000- numbers - or any other numbers - that should never be
dialed.

Add to that that there is no general way to predict what will happen if one
dials an unvalid number. Carol has demonstrated that dialing the international
prefix followed by the country code of the USA followed by 0, will connect to
an operator in the US. At least when dialing from Japan. Who knows what will
happen when you try it from Timbuktu. Attempting to automatically dial "non
existant" numbers is unsafe!!

It does not really concern me personally any more. I no longer have a POTS
setup. Dod not have one for the last five years. And for the five years before
that I configured it to never automatically dial out. Too much garbage in the
nodelist...

Despite that it is an issue that is dying out, I still say there should naver
be anything other than -Unpublished- or a valid dialable telephone number in
field 7 of the nodelist.


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MSVC 1.1.5-b20170303