Terribly stupid question, but one aproppos to this thread. If my company pays for and registers a new TLD, let's call it "smtp" for grins, and I create an A record for "smtp." in my top level zone file, how will users outside my company resolve and reach that address? If they simply use "smtp" as the hostname, most of the current resolver libraries will append the local domain name, so that instead of reaching my A record for smtp, they'll end up trying to reach smtp.their.domain. Will operating system manufacturers release updated resolver libraries that no longer assume that single token names should have the local domain attached? Or should I always ensure that resolvers reach my domain explicitly by including the trailing "dot" in all uses, so that my email would be given out as "myname@smtp." in the hopes that everyone would correctly remember to add the "." at the end when entering my email address into their mail clients? In the past, this wasn't really a concern, as you never had a case of a single entity owning an entire TLD, and as such you'd never see A or MX records showing up for an entire TLD. But now, with private ownership of TLDs possible, that could very well be the case in the future. Google could register .gmail, and decide that they want to have the shortest, easiest to remember addresses, so people can just be "user@gmail" (well, until MSN gets in the business, and decides that their users should have even shorter addresses, and register .msn so that their users can be "user@msn". ^_^; ) Or does the current resolver logic already handle these cases (check root, work your way down stopping at the first match found; if you run out of tokens in the string being resolved, append the local domain name to the string and start the process over)? Simply looking to solidify my understanding of how these new names would resolve. Thanks! Matt