Martin,
The local parts of the addresses definitely needs to support non
us-ascii characters. Consider the very common naming scheme
first_name(_dot_)last_name(_at_)company(_dot_)name(_dot_) There are a lot of
people out there
who have non us-ascii characters in their names.
I fear that we're on the verge of wandering into the swamp of "Names,
Addresses & Routes -- They're Different". The convention to which you
refer was promulgated by Henk (I can't remember his last name) of Phillips
and adopted by the EEMA in the late 80s. It never got any further, which
is why it's far from "common". Henk was trying to import into everyday
Internet mail a feature of X.400 O/R Addresses. To whit, that: a) the
personal-name was structured into distinct (first-name, surname, initials,
and generational-qualifier) components, and b) under-specified
personal-names (missing one or more components) that uniquely matched a
fully specified personal-name were considered a match. Henk's argument was
that by adopting the X.400 personal-name encoding convention of RFC 987
for all local-parts, it would be possible to employ similar matching
conventions for Internet mail, and that this would allow local-parts to be
guessed with an acceptably high probability of success. In practice, this
never happened, though some organizations did adopt his convention, among
a number of others.
Moving on, there is clearly rough consensus that it makes no sense to
restrict domain-names (yes, names) to an ASCII alphabet, though clearly a
pure ASCII encoding is required for backward compatibility. I think that
achieving a similar consensus for local-parts will be difficult. I for
one, will take a lot of convincing. We already have a means of associating
display-names, expressed in a range of alphabets with mailbox addresses
(yes, addresses). I also have the sense that people, as distinct from
corporations, like short local-parts. The last six posting to this list
(nick, maf, mutz, moore, sroberts, and even ned-ietf-822) would seem to back me
up.
Nick
Nick Shelness
Independent Technology Consultant
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