RE: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Lawrence Greenfield wrote:

> I think you're being a bit disingenuous here. Are you against the
> 8BITMIME extension? Do you think it is a failure? Was it a mistake?

It's a fair criticism, based on the fact that I just proposed a new CTE
that requires 8BitMIME on email.  The difference, I believe, is that
8BitMIME provides a 33% bandwidth reduction when it can be used
end-to-end, at the cost of requiring base64 transformations when
encountering a non-compliant MTA or MUA.

By contrast, I don't think IMAX offers any bandwidth, complexity, or
usability advantages, while still requiring a lot of additional
complexity in implementation.  In that way, as I said in the original
message, I believe it is much more analogous to the (since withdrawn)
proposal to implement IDNs using EDNS and UTF-8.  One could certainly
design something that would work, but it would require servers to be
upgraded, would offer no more functionality than IDNA, and would
increase complexity.  Why bother?

          - dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:[email protected]>
<http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>