Re: First strawman for UTF-8 headers proposal

At 9:12 AM -0700 12/1/03, Steve Hole wrote:
>You would be much better served to work within the constraints of the
>existing protocol if possible.   I'm sure that could be done with IMAP
>which already supports UTF-7 encodings.   You'd likely have to do a
>mapping of some kind.   Good luck with POP.

Given the massive preference for POP over IMAP in the marketplace, it 
would be unwise to adopt something that assumes wide use of IMAP.

>Please don't get me wrong.   An extension is possible and maybe is the
>right thing to do.  But please don't pretend that it is either simple to
>engineer or (more importantly) to deploy, because they aren't.   The same
>goes for SMTP as well ... even more so.

No one is pretending any of that. All IMA options will require lots 
of upgrading, and all have side-effects. The question is whether we 
can pick a reduction in side-effects that doesn't come at too high a 
cost. That's why I have two proposals on the table.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium