RE: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

At 20:37 03/02/26 -0800, Dan Kohn wrote:

>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,

agreed that this is negligible, and irrelevant.


>complexity, or usability advantages,

Disagreed. Let's say I were a procurer/sysadmin in Japan,
and would have to procure MTAs and MUAs for a whole department.
I would clearly buy a solution that lets me have a look at
all the stuff that's going on without having hundreds of
tools to make sure that I would see the right punycode
decoding at the right place (rather than to have to stare
at punycode anywhere). That would strongly reduce complexity
and increase usability for me, and improve service for my
user base.


>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message, I believe it is much more analogous to the (since withdrawn)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?

Why think about the long-term future of the internet?
Anyway, one of the problems in IDN was that there were so many
different ways that something could be negotiated/distinguished,
and none of them very well established. For SMTP, this is clearly
different. Also, the DNS is so low-level that it is in fact
possible to hide the uglyness of IDNA quite easily (look e.g.
at idnkit, http://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/idn/mdnkit/download/#sources).
It actually allows to patch binary applications in some cases.
This is quite different for IMAA, it's uglyness will show in
much more places.


Regards,     Martin.