Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

At 20:19 03/11/15 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

> > problem3: Allow non-ASCII addresses to appear literally on the wire.
> > solution: Some sort of new versions/extensions of the message header
> >           format, SMTP, and other mail-related protocols.
>
>I don't know that problem3 is a real problem.  Do users really care what
>the on-the-wire encoding looks like?  If so, why?

The absolutely final, non-expert end-user doesn't care
(as long as the MUA does the right job, which to some
extent is dependent on how convoluted the encoding is).
But as soon as somebody wants to do anything like a perl
script working on their mails, a procmail script, or anything
in that direction, or even just use 'more' or 'less' to peek into
their mail folders, it starts to matter big time.


>you might could use CNAMEs or maybe DNAMEs to make domain names equivalent.
>(that makes the lookup trickier - you have to lookup a.example.com to see
>if it's a CNAME pointing somewhere else before you can lookup
>_ams._tcp.a.example.com for a SRV record because both records cannot exist
>at the same time.)
>
>I need to reread stuff about DNAMEs to know whether they'd work.
>
>But it would really help to avoid being able to say that any email
>address at any domain is equivalent to another address at a different
>domain.  That introduces lots of problems.

I'm a big affraid that using CNAME or DNAME for a domain name such
as company.com might have rather restricting consequences on other
domains such as www.company.com and others. That would be due to
the specific usage patterns of domain names for email addresses,
which I think we should not assume people would be ready to give
up.


Regards,    Martin.