Re: First strawman for UTF-8 headers proposal

At 13:08 03/11/29 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:

>At 12:45 AM +0000 11/28/03, Adam M. Costello wrote:

>>   For the domain part, your proposal is
>>willing to downgrade to an ACE rather than bounce the message.  We might
>>as well define an ACE for the local part too, so that there would never
>>be a need to bounce messages.
>
>If we add that to my current proposal, then there are *three* possible 
>names that a mailbox might have; two of them are readable, one of them 
>isn't. I think that is too complicated.

I'm thinking about the tradeoff mentioned here a lot. I haven't made
up my mind, but I'm currently leaning to agreeing with Adam on this
point. The main reason is that it should significantly reduce
bounces, which I think is very importance for acceptance of the
new protocol.

As for three vs. two mailbox names, I'm not sure that's that bad.
First, it can provide an obvious choice for downgrading for cases
where people don't care at all about ASCII-only alternative mailbox
names. Second, there is the usual saying "zero, one, or many", i.e. for
many issues, the difference between two and three will be minimal,
once we get from one to two (i.e. many).

I would also like to note that this is something we have to consider
extremely carefully. We can always add a special lookup protocol for
alternative addresses (as proposed by Keith) later in the game if it
turns out that there is a need. But we can't add an ACE conversion
for downgrading to avoid bouncing later in the game, because it would
be very difficult to go out to everybody and tell them to change their
settings (receiving SMTP alias,...) from two addresses to three.

As for the argument that people don't want to see ACE, I fully and
totally agree with that. But I think there is a big difference if
you can tell them "this is only temporary, it will really truely
go away" and "if you upgrade your software, it will completely
go away".

The disadvantages are that it will lower the pressure on upgrades,
and might get halfway implementations (in particular, MUAs may
get quite a bit more sloppy at providing Address-map headers).
because you cannot go somewhere and tell them "if we want this
mail to go through, we have to upgrade".

Again, as I said, I haven't made up my mind on this really, yet.

Regards,    Martin.