Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)

The extremely broad To/Cc list was appropriate for the initial
announcement of the BOF, but for this ensuing discussion I'm guessing it
would be good to trim it down, so I did.

Mark Crispin <[email protected]> wrote:

> As presently constituted, email addresses are limited to the 26 Latin
> alphabetics, 10 digits, and a limited number of special characters in
> the ASCII character set.

Not so limited.  According to RFCs 821 & 822, all ASCII characters are
allowed.  According to RFCs 2821 & 2822, NUL is "obsolete", as are CR
and LF except as the pair CRLF.  (Obsolete means must be accepted and
must not be generated.)

Keith Moore <[email protected]> wrote:

> What is the source of the "growing need"?  Is it:
>
> a. for users of many languages (particularly those not using Latin
>    alphabets) email addresses are difficult to remember
> b. for users of many languages (particularly those not using Latin
>    alphabets) email addresses are difficult to transcribe or type
> c. users want to use their names in email addresses
> d. users are confused by apparently arbitrary restrictions on use of
>    characters in email addresses, and this leads to mistakes
> e. on computer systems employing non-ASCII names for other purposes
>    (e.g. login or account names) these do not map well to ASCII email
>    addresses
>
> or something else that I don't see?

Regarding (a), there are at least two kinds of remembering: one is
recognition (is this address the same one I saw yesterday? is it a font
variation or a different character?); the other, more challenging, is
recall (mentally retrieve the address I saw yesterday).  Even harder
than remembering is reproducing (draw the characters or find them on a
keyboard) which is (b).

I've heard claims of all of those sources, except (d).  But I think (d)
will become true if internationalized mail addresses are not introduced.
I think users will be astonished that non-ASCII characters are allowed
after the at-sign but not before it.

I guess a problem statement should include both the motivation and the
challenge.  The challenge is the same as for internationalized domain
names:  Given a huge installed infrastructure of protocols, end-user
software, and intermediate software, all built on the assumption that
identifiers are ASCII, how can you relax that assumption without causing
so much breakage and non-interoperability that people would rather stick
with the existing ASCII system than endure the transition?

There are presumably several challenges, but that is the one that I see
as the main challenge.  I suppose that the people advocating approaches
very different from IMAA might think I'm overestimating the height
of this hurdle, and therefore might see something else as the main
challenge.

AMC