Re: Can we back up a bit and ask some basic questions? An alternate model

At 10:31 03/02/15 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:

>>(a) We define a new SMTP extension.  For purposes of discussion, let's 
>>call it UTF8ADDRESSES.
>
>Therefore IMAA-UTF8 cannot achieve wide use until this extension is nearly 
>universally adopted. When you get a business card from a colleague that 
>has an internationalized email address, you can probably assume that their 
>MTA supports UTF8ADDRESSES, but there is no way for you to know if your 
>own MTA supports it, so you don't know if you can send him or her mail.

Well, I think we can distinguish the following main situations here:
(taking Japanese as an example)

1) You don't know Japanese, so you won't even try.
2) You have such an address yourself, and if your MTA supports it
    on incoming mail, the chances are high it will work for outgoing mail.
3) You have tried it for another, similar, address, and it failed,
    so you won't try it again unless you have good reasons to assume
    it might have improved.
4) You'll give it a try, and see what happens. You might also
    cc the mail to the older (ASCII-only) address to make sure.


>With IMAA-UTF8, you always need to know that the originating MTA supports 
>UTF8ADDRESSES. If you are a road warrior, you would need to know if your 
>on-the-road ISP's MTAs support UTF8ADDRESSES before you could send mail to 
>an IMAA-UTF8 address. Of course, you have no control over this.

Well, I have my 'on-the-road MTA', but I don't use its MTA.
SMTP after POP and now SSH tunneling work fine fine for me,
and wouldn't be affected. Similar for VPNs that many companies
use these days for security reasons. Of course, individual
mileage may vary.


>With IMAA-UTF8, if a company has an MTA that supports UTF8ADDRESSES, and 
>they want to add a firewall that has an SMTP proxy, that proxy must 
>support UTF8ADDRESSES. Today, companies can safely add firewalls that have 
>SMTP proxies that have fewer ESMTP services than the MTA for which they front.

Your last sentence can be interpreted in two ways. In the trivial way,
such SMTP firewalls are always possible if the ESMPT service is not
needed. That wouldn't be different for IMAA-UTF8.

The other interpretation would raise some questions: Do you want to say
that all functionality offered by current ESMTP options can be tunnelled
over MTAs that don't offer these options? And do you claim that this is
true not only on paper (as spec'ed), but also in real life (implementations)?


Regards,   Martin.