Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

Hello Keith,

Many thanks for this proposal, which shows a sketch of a solution
and therefore shows more clearly where you think the problem is.

Having some kind of 'alternative address mechanism' both in the
email message as well as in the form of a lookup service is
definitely at least 'nice to have'. But I'm not sure we address
the main problem.

My guess up to now was that with reasonably easy work on the MUA
side, it would be possible to avoid sending e.g. a Japanese address
to an English-only speaker (or Latin-only reader). People can already
use e.g. Japanese comments (containing their actual name), and many
MUAs just show these, but there are no big complaints about these
showing up in MUAs. So as a counter-position to your proposal, I
would claim that people (hopefully with some help of MUAs) are able
to manage the problem of 'which address version to use for which
recipients'.

Another issue, if I understand the proposals right, is that the
actual addressing is always done on the pure ascii-only address
in the original From:,... fields. So in one way or another, the
alternative addresses are just comments or decorations, and they
are just sent so that we don't have the recipient to have to look
them up, so that we can avoid privacy issues. That somehow doesn't
look like much different from the current 'comments' facility.

Regards,    Martin.

At 17:29 03/11/15 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

>This is intended to be a rough sketch of something which I'm wondering
>might be a solution.
>
>Obviously there are a lot of details to work out, but offhand I think this
>basic approach looks workable.  I'd appreciate it if initial comments on this
>were about the feasability of the basic approach that could make or break
>it, rather than about protocol or implementation details.  IMHO, IETF WGs
>often slow themselves down by expecting fully-worked-out specifications for
>initial proposals. So comments about such details should wait for a detailed
>specification.  Please use your best judgement about whether such comments are
>appropriate at this stage.
>
>--
>
>In a nutshell, there are two parts of the problem:
>
>1. a sender wants to be able to type in a recipient address that is easy
>to remember and/or transcribe (from paper or sounds)
>
>2. a recipient wants to be able to remember or transcribe a recipient
>address (to paper or sounds) in such a way that it can be used later,
>or given to another potential sender
>
>Note that the sender and recipient may not share the ability to use
>language/script in which an address was supplied by the sender.
>
>--