Re: if you really want utf-8 headers...

> I think getting UTF-8 for the message store and for POP and IMAP is
> great. But I don't think Paul or John (and the rest of us) are starting
> at the wrong end, I just see it as them doing one part of the overall 
> work.
> The work on downgrading/upgrading has to be done anyway, and better
> only once.

I agree that a specification for how to do the conversion is necessary, 
and that it should only be done once.  The disagreement is really about 
whether it's a good idea to try to send these messages through SMTP 
(making SMTP more complex and error-prone in the process) and also SMTP 
negotiation is a good way to define the boundary between the legacy 
mail system and the mail system that supports utf-8.

>  And looking at all the pieces has various advantages:
>
> - We make sure that things work together
> - We get some increased push on adoption, because people have
>   various ways and places to start upgrading. It's often difficult
>   to predict in which sequence upgrading will happen; the best thing
>   to me seems to have consistent/compatible upgrades available
>   across the board.
> - We know that adoption won't necessarily be that quick. If we
>   think it takes five years or more, we shouldn't start at one
>   end and wait for that to be fairly upgraded and then start at
>   the other end.
> - A simplified MUA is an excellent example of the benefit of 
> streamlining
>   to UTF-8. But for that to work, the MUA not only has to be able
>   to receive messages with UTF-8 headers, it also has to be able
>   to send them. For that, it seems that an SMTP extension is just
>   about right.

Mumble.  Yes, we need to "look at" all of the pieces, at least to 
understand how they are affected by IMAA.  However I doubt we can 
afford to fully specify all of the pieces before we start implementing 
some of them, and I'm fairly certain that we can't afford to insist 
that the entire signal path be upgraded before IMAAs can work.  This 
means that we must find a way to make IMAAs work without upgrading the 
mail transport, and probably, without upgrading the message stores.  
If, separately, we can upgrade the mail transport to make it more 
efficient to transport such messages, that's fine - and that upgrade 
can be evaluated on its own merits,
and it can happen independently of IMAA deployment.

If we're going to upgrade the mail infrastructure, of course we want to 
improve transparency and add the ability to handle IMAAs, but there are 
a lot more important things to consider than that.

And no, an SMTP extension is not "just about right" for sending utf-8 
headers, because this means that we're making mail transport more 
complex and less reliable for the sake of making MUAs simpler.  That's 
moving the complexity in the wrong direction, and SMTP already has 
enough problems without trying to make it bear the burden of enforcing 
a border between utf-8 header mail and ascii header mail.