Re: rough sketch of a potential solution

> >I don't know if this problem will be big enough to justify building a
> >special new infrastructure to solve it, but I can see that there is
> >indeed a problem.
> 
> That's the point I'm trying to make: There are of course cases
> where this might be handy, but they are rather special, and
> people are used to deal with these kinds of issues in a natural
> way anyway, which reduces the need to get this handled completely
> by machines.
> 
> That suggests that it is not really worth the effort of creating
> an additional protocol and an infrastructure, with all it's issues.

Mumble.  As a single-language user, I'm really not in a position to judge
whether the use case of the address mapping service is important enough
to warrant creating the protocol or asking for user agents to support it.
I can say with reasonable confidence how much impact it will have on
interactions between email protocols but not how useful it is to speakers
of other languages.

However calling the new service "infrastructure" seems a bit misleading.
The mapping service can be deployed incrementally on a per-domain basis
based on whether the users of that domain appear to need it; and all that
is needed to advertise that the service exists is to set up a SRV record.


> It looks like this issue would be solved almost equally well by
> having a separate (directory-like) lookup structure, independent
> of the mailing address issues. I.e., you would check whether
> I had a Y-address. Then you would put that Y-address in the 'To:'
> field, and send the address.
> 
> Of course, this could be somewhat automated, so that it would
> look like a single step to you. The difference to Keith's
> proposal would be that in every single mail, only a single
> address (or potentially a fixed number, such as one i18n address
> and one ASCII fallback,...) would be sent.

Another difference would be that in your proposal, if the sender and 
any of the recipients had different language or script preferences, 
the address chosen by the sender for himself or any of the recipients
might not be easy to remember, or easy to transcribe, for some of the
other recipients.

That and offhand a "separate (directory-like) lookup structrure" sounds
like more infrastructure than the address mapping service I'm proposing,
though of course that's just what the word "directory-like" means to me.

Keith