To: cs.utk.edu!moore
Cc: att!dimacs.rutgers.edu!ietf-822
Subject: Re: Comment on the draft MIME Part 1 document
Date: 27 Apr 1993 16:59 EDT
However, I can't help but ask, how do you stave off users who want to do
exactly that, though?
What if people want to use their names for logins, and their names happen
to use 8-bit characters?
I think the question really is, "how do we accomodate this?" It can't be,
"how do we prevent this?", as I don't think we can prevent it. Look at the
just-send-8 arguments. We couldn't prevent it, so we invented a way to
accomodate it. That is, ways were invented such that, if you wanted to do
it, there is now a specified way of doing it.
We can't prevent people from using 8-bit characters as login names. However,
if they use that login name for an email address, they won't be able to
receive mail at all from many sites around the world. My perception is that
this practice is not nearly as widespread as that of sending 8-bit body parts.
Restricting addresses to 7-bit ASCII is a necessity for general
interoperability...at least until the entire world adopts a larger universal
character set.
That's not to say that we cannot recommend a way of encoding addresses as
ASCII characters. (No, the RFC 1342 encoding is NOT appropriate.)
Keith