RE: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Hello Dan,

At 15:54 03/02/26 -0800, Dan Kohn wrote:

>Simon, I feel that Paul is showing a Sisyphean level of patience here,
>but I know it can't continue.  I believe you understand that very
>similar issues were hashed out, and an ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE)
>solution was adopted in IDNA.

The issues were somewhat very similar, and somewhat they are
probably quite different. I know that Paul may easily get tired
because he went through similar argumentation before, and probably
also because one of the purposes of working on IDN was to get some
solution for IMAs. But some people (such as John Klensin) think that
there are important differences between IDN and IMA. So closing
the discussion early just because one is tired from a previous
discussion doesn't seem adequate.



>The exact same logic holds for IMAA, and is why an IMAX ESMTP extension
>simply adds no meaningful value over IMAA for the only folks who care
>about i18n, which is the end-users.

End-users should be taken quite widely here. Somebody who is trying
to write a new and interesting spam filter may be an end user.
Email isn't just only passed around by MTAs and then read by people
using MUAs, there are all kinds of other ways in which it is processed.


>The whole point of IMAA, as I'm sure you know, is that we don't want
>i18n support in MTAs.  Why bother?  It's a huge amount of work, and any
>mail admin who really cares about the LHS can still treat it as an
>opaque string (as the standard says it is).  Other than the specific
>issue of sub-addressing, the whole concept of an I18NMTA is a huge
>amount of work for no value.

Let's look at it. Making MTAs work with 8-bit headers in many ways
is actually rather trivial. Doing negotiation isn't exactly trivial,
but it is done already for 8BITMIME, and probably for other extensions
(which is a huge difference from the IDN situation, as John noted).

The main problem isn't the amount of work it takes in each instance,
it is that due to various historical accidents, we are currently
in a situation that is significantly suboptimal for everybody.
We can either say "we are deep in this mess, let's dig deeper",
or we can say "let's think about how we might dig into a
direction where we might get out of this mess".


> > If you believe IMAX would make Internet mail unreliable, please
> > explain why.
>
>Because most MTAs don't support IMAX, and so every IMAX-capable MUA and
>MTA would always have to be downgrading to IMAA (or have to bounce the
>message), in which case no value has been added, but a lot of addition
>work has been done.  Since there will always be some non-IMAX capable
>MTAs and MUAs, IMAA will always have to be around, so everyone of those
>IMAX MUAs and MTAs will still need to implement punycode.

This situations seems to be quite similar to 8BITMIME. Still
8BITMIME is used a lot.


>Simon, I've seen this movie before, and I know how it ends.  The ACE
>wins.

So you are concluding from a sample of 1?


>If you want to go forward with IMAX, you may even succeed in getting it
>published as Experimental, though I doubt it.  But no one will implement
>it, since it adds lots of effort but no value over IMAA, so why bother?

By your argumentation, 8BITMIME would have become experimental, and
nobody would have implemented it. Why do you think reality as we
see it today is different?

Regards,    Martin.