At 17:16 02/05/2002 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> >Second, you're failing to consider that there's essentially no incentive
> >for a significant percentage of the world's mail users or MTA operators
> >to upgrade. An approach that relies on MUA upgrades to provide the new
> >functionality lets those who benefit from the new functionality - those
> >who have an incentive - do the upgrade and get immediate benefit. This
> >gets it deployed more quickly for those users who need it.
>
> I think this is the key issue.
>
> People in the UK, USA (and a large percentage of Europe) won't want to
> fiddle with things that ain't broke just so that some people can send them
> emails that they can't understand... This means that the majority of
> Internet users will be running mail systems which people using IDN
> wouldn't be able to contact in the near/mid future.
actually, they'll be able to contact each other. it's just that the IDNs
will be displayed in encoded form on the systems that haven't been upgraded,
and the user with the non-upgraded MUA will have to type in the ugly encoded
form of the address (or copy-and-paste that address into his address book).
Assuming the MTAs & MUAs can handle it properly.
if you substitute "ascii equivalent" for "latin equivalent", that's
essentially what IDNA does.
It would work better if the latin equivalent was 'china-timber.cn' rather
than 'A863B350DHRS-25323-52GH.A4GWT' (or whatever the Unicoded translation
into ASCII would be). This would make the job a LOT easier for (almost)
everyone involved, as non IDN capable MTAs would only have to do
comparisons on ASCII text rather than Unicode text etc, and non-local
senders could use the ASCII text version of the domain name.
Frankly, I don't think the demand for non-ascii addresses is from folks
who want to use such addresses to communicate with speakers of other
languages - I think it's from people who want to use them when
communicating with speakers of their own language.
Agreed - thus...
> If you want Chinese (for instance) emails just to have a scope of
> China, then why not have a new set of protocols ('UDNS', 'USMTP' etc)
which
> handle Unicode addressing, with gateways run by ISPs in those countries to
> convert 'USMTP' to SMTP to go to the rest of the world.
arrgh! sure, let's build an entire mail system from scratch and run two
incompatible mail systems just so that half of the users can have one
additional feature. makes *lots* of sense...
If the alternative is to break everything else in the world, then it COULD
make a lot of sense. (If it won't break anything else, then what's this
discussion all about then :-) )
You don't need to 'build an entire mail system from scratch'. Simply, for
instance, run IDN capable MTAs/MUAs on port 2025 (or whatever), and
everyone else continue on port 25, with gateways 'sanitising' things as
they pass from the IDN -> non-IDN world. I agree that it's a daft idea, but
not TOTALLY ludicrous :-)
Alternatively, you could have part of the 'IDN MTA' standard to have a new
ESMTP capability, and if an IDN capable MTA talks to a non-IDN capable MTA,
the IDN capable MTA has to 'sanitise' the data in a carefully prescribed
manner before sending it on. (This is probably a lot less daft than my
previous suggestion :-) )
EG, you could have modifications to the RCPT and MAIL commands so that
messages are transferred (in the IDN 'world') as something like:
RCPT TO: <AFAS356GSS(_at_)A863B350DHRS-25323-52GH(_dot_)A4GWT>
ASCII=joe(_at_)china-timber(_dot_)cn
Then, when an IDN MTA talks to a non-IDN MTA, it simply replaces the RCPT
data with the 'ASCII=' text.
Obviously, people in IDN 'worlds' would have to have two 'names' (one
'local', one 'ASCII') for each user if they are going to be communicated to
from other countries, but that would probably make sense anyway. (If there
isn't an ASCII= extension, you could either bounce the message when it goes
out of the IDN 'world', or you could send it unchanged and hope for the
best :-) )
If it worked this way, then the only people who would need to worry about
IDN would be people who wanted to use it - everyone else would keep things
EXACTLY as they are now.
Paul VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
paul(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk http://www.pscs.co.uk/