Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

On Monday, November 17, 2003, at 03:08  AM, Martin Duerst wrote:

>> Log file format is in any event a locale-specific issue, so it's not 
>> clear
>> that it would be appropriate for an MTA to log an unencoded UTF-8 
>> address to a
>> log file on a system that used some other charset in its locale.
>
> First, it's not a system that uses a locale, it's just a certain
> user/application/whatever.

Well, that depends on whether the application maintains its own log 
file or whether it uses a common logging facility like syslog.

> In addition to that, assuming addresses in many different (languages
> and) scripts, you better use UTF-8 or another encoding that is able
> to encode all of Unicode/ISO 10646.

I still view logging as a local matter, however I would have no problem 
with recommending that MTAs that log addresses do so in a way that 
permits display of addresses without decoding if local system tools and 
the log facility permit this.

>> > Essentially this proposal appear to add a i18n-layer for e-mail, a
>> > "presentation" layer if you wish, on top of RFC 2822 and SMTP.  
>> While
>> > this may be preferable for ASCII people, having i18n as an "add-on"
>> > appear rather fragile to me.  But that's only my initial reaction.
>>
>> Even if we were designing a new mail system from scratch to handle 
>> these
>> requirements, I think we would need a lookup across the net at the 
>> time
>> that the message is composed (or submitted) in order to handle the 
>> case where
>> at least one recipient can't transcribe the sender's "native" address.
>
> As I tried to explain in another mail, I'm not really clear on this.
> The sender should not send an address that the receiver doesn't know
> how to read.

The problem is that there may be multiple recipients and the sender may 
not know which recipients can read which languages, or even if this is 
known, the sender may not know alternative addresses for some of the 
recipients.  Consider a reply to a message that was originally sent to 
a list of recipients, some of whom the sender knows and some of whom 
the sender doesn't know.  Either the original message or the reply 
could be in multiple languages (say with multipart/alternative)

Keith