Re: UUCP, etc., and SMTP/822/MIME mail (was: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-utf8headers-00.txt)

--On Friday, 02 January, 2004 18:19 +0100 Keld Jørn Simonsen 
<[email protected]> wrote:

>...
> I am not sure that we today should only go for UTF-8 for the
> enhancements on email addresses, as UTF-8 as used in IETF
> specs is not an international standard. We should probably
> then rather use what we already did for names, and the
> functions to handle this is already there. I also fear that
> just sending 8 bit will harm existing conforming
> implementations.

Keld,

I'll let others respond to others of your points if they feel 
like it.  To them, the strongest thing I can say is what I have 
said before -- fewer options promote better interoperability 
and, while I'm not a huge fan of UTF-8, I consider, in the 
absence of overwhelming arguments and something _clearly_ 
better, UTF-8 alone to be a better choice than UTF-8 plus 
something.

I don't know that anyone has proposed "just sending 8 bit".  An 
existing implementation that has any 8 bit characters in its 
headers is not conforming, so the question of a conforming 
implementation interpreting 8 bit strings as other than UTF-8 
(or whatever a standard specifies) is just not an issue.   And, 
because of the history of non-conforming implementations sending 
assorted unlabeled 8bit stuff (much more in message bodies than 
in headers in my experience), existing conforming 
implementations that cannot accept such things and do something 
plausible (including optionally cleaning rejecting it) would 
have self-destructed years ago.

   john