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

Mark Davis wrote:
> 
> An international email address would be portable as far a computers are
> concerned; the issue would be for people: how to view it and how to key it in
> (as you note). In both cases, that depends more on the client software than the
> protocols.
> 
> I wouldn't be able to type in an email address in Tamil (though I could
> certainly copy and paste it). I would wager that anyone who cares to have his
> email used by foreigners would have dual email addresses, or perhaps even more;
> e.g. Tamil, Latin, and Chinese.

I seem to remember this coming up in another discussion and the immediately following point was how hard it is to do a cut and paste from a business card with the "native language" email address into a user interface that has no clue.

The problem is there is more than one human/machine interface for email addresses.  It is a technically simple thing to have multiple addresses, but it is not technically simple to be certain that the address I give you works when you try to communicate with me. 

-- 
John Wagner