Re: Global and national e-mail address

For the record, Paul and I are apparently in complete agreement 
about this.   And in particular, as I should have mentioned in 
my longer response... that this is ultimately an old idea, that 
it has been proposed and tried several times before and that, 
except in isolated communities (which Paul refers to as 
"everyone is using Foo MUA and Bar MTA"), the people who have 
done so have given up on it because it doesn't work 
interoperably.

    john


--On Monday, 08 December, 2003 12:00 -0800 "Paul Hoffman / IMC" 
<[email protected]> wrote:

>
> 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