To: moore
Subject: Re: Comment on the draft MIME Part 1 document
Date: 27 Apr 1993 22:47 EDT
It sounds like you have an idea already on what would be appropriate.
Would you care to elaborate? Also, why do you think the 1342 encoding is
not appropriate?
I haven't really thought it through, but a few things seem clear.
1342 style encodings aren't appropriate because the local part of an address
needs to be (a) unique and (b) opaque.
Unique, because there shouldn't be lots of ways to spell an address. Having
multiple spellings places a burden on the recipient's MTA, and also every
mail handling agent that needs to compare addresses. I maintain a number of
large mailing lists and it's a royal pain to tell whether two addresses
indicate the same person or not...I don't want to make this any more
difficult. (Absolute uniqueness is not necessary, but there should be a
small number of ways to spell an address.)
Opaque, because it's not acceptable to have such strings translated from one
character set to another, or for other mail handling agents to interpret
them...they need to get passed on as a character string. (some systems even
care that you spell a local-part in the correct case).
I'll see if I can come up with something more concrete...
Keith