Re: POP3 mailbox names and IMAP userids

Roy Badami writes:
> It is not uncommon, for instance, for the POP3 mailbox name to be the
> entire RFC-822 address, possibly with some other character (such as
> percent) substituted for at-sign, presumably to accomodate broken
> clients that believe that a POP3 mailbox name cannot contain an
> at-sign.

Correct. The same protocol works just fine in a UTF-8 world. (As far as
I know, the only relevant software bugs are in the client UI, where some
graphical clients assume 8859-1 rather than UTF-8.)

This is a good illustration of the advantages of a universal character
encoding. Sure, it's _possible_ to have different character encodings in
different locations, with nasty conversions whenever information moves
from one location to another; but getting it right is so difficult that
the GoofyCode proponents would rather say stupid things like ``out of
scope'' than even begin talking about the details. In contrast, UTF-8
works with the same simple byte copying that we use for ASCII today.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago