BOF request - Internationalization of Email Addressing

Hi.

After wrestling in my own mind with whether trying to do email 
address internationalization at the MUA-only level by tricky 
encoding is really feasible and sensible --hoping it was but 
fearing it was not-- I've given up.   If you have been following 
the traffic on Paul Hoffman's "IMAA" list ([email protected]), 
you will have noticed an explosion about "bidi issues" that 
makes it pretty clear that subtle ways to decompose and 
recompose local parts are bad news (some of those issues may 
actually invalidate IDNA itself).  It is not, of course, the 
only problem.

The question of what can, and cannot, sensibly be hidden from 
the MTAs and done at the MUA level is a rather fundamental 
architectural one.  It is quite independent of the technical 
details of one proposal or another, although the degeneration of 
one or another type of proposal into a hopeless kludge (a state 
that clearly in the mind of the observer, of course) might be a 
strong argument for looking at the other one.

In order to have at least a partially-adequate comparison, I've 
just sent in an I-D that explores and defines an ESMTP extension 
that would permit UTF-8 mailbox strings.   It may not be the 
best way to do MTA-level internationalization, just as the IMAA 
proposal may or may not be the best way to do MUA-level 
internationalization, but it should provide a sufficient 
strawman to focus the issues.

Partially because this appears to me to be an architectural 
issue, I would like to propose a BOF for Minneapolis with the 
hope that the high-level architectural issues (at least) can be 
flushed out and discussed.  The reading list for that BOF should 
be

	* A general familiarity with RFC 2821 and 2822 and with
	IDNA
	
	* draft-hoffman-imaa-02.txt or its successor
	
	* draft-klensin-email-idn-00.txt (now in queue, to be
	posted RSN) ior its successor.

I do not want to and am not willing to chair this BOF.  I think 
it should be one of you, or someone chosen by/from the IAB, or 
someone else you select.

regards,
      john