RE: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Dan Kohn wrote:

>> I believe sysadmins who care can use a punycode decoding tool (or
>> Emacs macro) and that the vast majority won't care.

D. J. Bernstein writes:

> Won't care? _Won't care_?

Yes, won't care.  The difference between <display-name> and <addr-spec>
(using the constructs from Section 3.4 of RFC 2822) is that the former
is unambiguously user text (in the RFC 2277 sense) and the latter can be
treated much more like a protocol element.  I agree that it is nice to
often be able to guess usernames or use heuristics about their meaning,
but it's not necessary.  (One could argue that it would also be nice to
know what MAIL FROM or Content-Disposition means in your native tongue
rather than treating them as abstract protocol elements, which they
obviously are.)

Anyway, I'm not making an absolutist argument here, that things are only
protocol or text and never anything in between.  I'm just pointing out
that a Japanese mail admin certainly *could* get by just fine treating
the LHS and RHS of <addr-spec> as opaque text, as they would have to do
anyway for many of their users' correspondents' ASCII addresses.

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