Re: comments on yesterday's presentations

Keith Moore <[email protected]> wrote:

[A good case for the ACE approach in mail addresses.]

[Reasons why a change-the-message-format approach is not as simple and
obvious as it might seem, but needs careful study.]

> At some point the message format needs to change, but we can't really
> evaluate whether it's worth it at any particular point without doing
> the impact analysis.

And even if the result of that analysis is that the message format
should be changed, each non-ASCII address will need an ASCII counterpart
during the transition period, as a fallback for when a message bumps
up against an old piece of the infrastructure.  The ASCII counterpart
can be either an ACE or something prettier that gets looked up
online.  The ACE approach is much easier because it doesn't require any
infrastructure support.  With the online lookup approach, a user who
creates a non-ASCII address needs to also create an ASCII address and
keep them pointed at the same mailbox and make sure that some server
somewhere is providing the mapping between the two addresses (it would
probably have to be a DNS server, because people expect to be able to
send/receive mail from behind a firewall that blocks everything and
provides only a DNS server and an SMTP relay).  If we can dismiss the
online-lookup idea as too burdensome, then we need an ACE-based approach
regardless of the outcome of the new-message-format analysis, so we
might as well push ahead on both in parallel.

> 6. Users need to be able to transcribe addresses that they receive in
> email, whether in message headers or in a message body, and whether
> or not their software supports the extensions that enable IMAs, and
> whether or not the recipient knows the language and script in which
> the sender normally writes his name and email address.
>
> (Note: #6 directly implies the need to support multiple versions of a
> sender address...
>
> all that is required is that there be one address that is
> transcribable by any potential recipient. but for me it's an open
> question as to whether a Latin alphabet / ASCII-encoded fallback is
> sufficient, given the absence of those characters on many of the
> world's keyboards.

#6 is going to be pretty hard to satisfy.  Maybe if the ACE form
contained only digits, that would do it, but the ACE form of the domain
part of the address has already been settled, and it contains ASCII
letters.

If you want to add a third form (or more forms), I don't see how without
creating and maintaining a bunch of aliases (which would involve
configuring both DNS servers and mail servers).

AMC