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

Use ENUM. Get a phone number and NAPTR it to a mailto:[email protected]

-James Seng

Adam M. Costello wrote:

> 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]
> 
>