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

"Edmon Chung" <[email protected]> writes:

> Good to hear from you.
> I actually agree with you about the M- headers thing... i wasnt so sure to
> begin with.
> But in order to phase out the ACE fallback, there needs to be new header
> fields that could use email addresses in other forms than ACE...  What are
> your thoughts?

I don't think the issues need to be linked -- it would be possible to
phase out punycoded address in SMTP MAIL FROM but keep them in message
headers.  It seems to me that internationalization of RFC 2821 and
POP3 and IMAP is independent of internationalization of RFC 2822.  It
seems unlikely that it will be possible to move away from punycode in
RFC 2822 soon because it is a stored format rather than a interactive
protocol like RFC 2821.  In a protocol you can agree on new
non-back-wards compatible behaviour for a single session (such as your
proposal) because all parties that are interested in the session are
present and can negotiate, but in a storage format any new features
should either be developed within the original or specification, or a
completely new version of the format should be developed, because all
parties that will see a certain RFC 2821 message is not present and
able to interact with the sender to negotiate what features to use.

A separate issue: I think your document should say that the strings
passed in MAIL FROM (whether as ACE or UTF-8) should be processed by
the IMA stringprep profile.