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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:

> 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.

Sorry for following up to myself, but on second thought I think this
was a poor suggestion.  The stringprep processing should be performed
by the receiver.  The sender may do it, but shouldn't be required to.

My main reason is that stringprep is Unicode specific, and this
proposal parametrizes the character set, which is a good property.
Thus, stringprep would only be applicable to the UTF-8 case, which
would be confusing.  The alternative, to restrict the proposal to only
UTF-8 would be less useful.  Another alternative would be to add a
meta-charset "IMAA" which is UTF-8 with IMAA stringprep processing,
but I see no gain from it.

Another reason is that a robust receiver will perform stringprep
processing anyway, to be sure to catch non-IMAA aware clients, which
would be used when someone uses e.g. telnet to a SMTP port.