Re: Subaddressing

At 10:23 PM +0100 2/15/03, Marc Mutz wrote:
>I haven't followed the IDNA discussions, so I don't know how much of an
>issue server security and scalability had on the design of IDNA, but,
>looking back, IDNA does a very good job of keeping complexity out of
>the server.

"very good" = complete

>Because strictly opaque local-parts require the interpretation to happen
>after the ToUnicode operation, which increases the complexity of the
>server (US-ASCII/char*->UTF-8/wchar_t transition).

Whoa. Server interpretation of IMAA-ACE is only required when the 
server is already interpreting the LHS, that is, when the server is 
making the LHS non-opaque. Servers use of ToUnicode is strictly 
optional.

>I assert - and the IDNA design agrees with me here - that it is a great
>deal more important to keep complexity out of the server than to keep
>the strict opaque local-part concept.

Please do not say things like "the IDNA design agrees with me here". 
The IDNA design had nothing to do with keeping complexity out of 
servers: it was about making no changes to servers. That is the same 
design principle that we used with IMAA-ACE.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium