Re: draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n-00

Adam and others,

One thing I should have added to my previous note...

While it would add implementation work up and down the line, and 
would create a "transition strategy" we would never be able to 
get rid of,  and hence might not be desirable, the two 
approaches are not necessarily incompatible.

Technically speaking, the transport infrastructure could 
accommodate specially-encoded local parts as well as UTF-8 ones, 
just as it could recognize and accommodate punycode domain names 
as well as UTF-8 ones.  Of course, some local-parts that would 
be meaningful in UTF-8 could not be recoded without loss of 
information (e.g., those positional cases and cases dependent on 
delimiter characters that were not ASCII "specials"), but, as a 
transition/ backward compatibility strategy, that might be more 
tolerable than it would be as the long-term (exclusive) plan. 
One could even revisit the none-too-successful "downgrading" 
options that are part of 8BITMIME.

Is it a good idea?  I'm personally biased against temporary/ 
transition strategies which we don't have a good plan for 
getting rid of... and I don't see a plausible plan for this 
case.  But it might be worth some consideration.

    john