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

Sam Roberts <[email protected]> wrote:

> I'm suggesting that email addresses should be at least as useable as
> telephone numbers.

If you want email addresses to be at least as usable as telephone
numbers, don't you need to restrict them to just the digits?  Certainly
the number of people who can cope with digits exceeds the number of
people who can cope with Latin letters.

If ASCII email addresses are better than non-ASCII email addresses,
would numeric email addresses be even better still?  Is it unfortunate
that non-digits were ever allowed in domain names and local parts in
the first place?  Did allowing ASCII letters make email addresses less
usable than they otherwise would have been?

Or did allowing ASCII letters make email addresses more usable?  Maybe
it's a tradeoff between different kinds of usability.

Would allowing even more characters make email addresses even less
usable, or even more usable?  Is the set of ASCII letters and digits the
optimal point between the extremes?  If so, why?

AMC

P.S.  We can't quite limit email addresses to just the digits, because
there has to be an at-sign, and scalable administration demands dots
in the domain name, and the TLD needs to contain a non-digit to avoid
being confused with an IP address, so the closest we can come might be
something like this:

[email protected]