Re: Global and national e-mail address

At 1:27 PM +0100 12/8/03, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
>  >From the above, my choice for representing the Global e-mail address
>(the address everybody will be able to use) is to use the full Latin alphabet.

You didn't mention the encoding you suggest to be used. Nor how to 
protect current mail software that is not expecting such an encoding 
from failing miserably. This gets to the heart of the matter.

For many years (at least since early 1998), I have heard of people 
using various repertoires in various encodings on the LHS (and the 
RHS, of course), saying it works, but then saying "as long as 
everyone is using Foo MUA and Bar MTA". The suggestion is obvious: 
the problems associated with it are not.

If you are proposing using ISO 8859-1 as the encoding, that seems 
like a no-brainer: it's just turning on the high bit. But some MTAs 
will ignore the high bit, so they will deliver mail to the wrong 
mailbox. Some MUAs will ignore the high bit on responding, sending 
the mail to the wrong place.

Or did you mean using UTF-8, but limiting the repertoire to "Latin"? 
This gets you the worst of the above problems, and adds in others 
(such as about two billion people "cheating" and using the characters 
that they actually use in their names).

This has been suggested many times before. The folks who tried it 
gave up because it failed. If you have tried it in an open mail 
environment and had it work, feel free to report your success.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium