ietf-822
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Re: Mail addresses and extended character sets

2001-06-29 04:13:33

In <01K5AH23LZXM0000AQ(_at_)mauve(_dot_)mrochek(_dot_)com> 
ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com writes:

     =2340242a2324512a2451=.foo.ch
or   =2340242a2324512a24512e666f6f=.ch
or   =2340242a2324512a24512e666f6f2e6368=

And the answer is that there will be only one way to do this. Again, if you
intend to get into this issues you *really* need to follow and possibly
participate in the IDN discussion.

No need. The answers given so far seem to indicate that my concerns are
mostly covered.


Another long-term solution to all this, of course, is to use UTF-8 in mail
headers, and then the whole problem goes away (so far as mail is concerned
- the DNS might still need to be fixed).

On the contrary, using UTF-8 does NOT address this issue. See Keith's point
above about combining and non-combining characters. Because of this a just send
UTF-8 solution doesn't work. You need another mechanism -- IDN's nameprep --
to deal with this problem.

No, I accept that the UTF-8 has to be normalized, at least according to
Unicode NFKC, but probably with additional limitations described in
nameprep. But at the end of that, what you have is restricted UTF-8. That
would be in a fit state to send as-is if there were an "8bit-headers"
extension to SMTP (with matching relaxation of RFC 2822). But there isn't,
so a further encoding is needed to squash it into current addr-spec
syntax. But one hopes that "8bit-headers" will remain the long-term goal.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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