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Dual names, IDN and ASCII, in e-mail addresses?

2003-09-25 12:37:45

IDN will soon be a practical reality, and non-ASCII
characters in e-mail addresses will probably soon be common
also in the localpart of the e-mail address.

This means that lots of people are going to have e-mail
addresses like Göran(_at_)Müller(_dot_)de(_dot_) And one of the main
problems with such names is that people in other countries
will have difficulty typing them. My guess is that many
Americans will have problem typing Göran(_at_)Müller(_dot_)de, and
typing names in totally different alphabets like Greek,
Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese will be even
more difficult.

Because of this, many people will have business cards with
English information on one side, and information in their
own language on the other side. They will then also have
two e-mail addresses, since the ASCII version of IDN should
obviously be hidden from humans as much as possible.

They might then use their national e-mail address for
national mail, and their international e-mail address for
international mail. And certainly mail intended for one
region may get into another region, so that e-mail with
national names in some heading field will often get resent
internatinally.

One of the areas where MIME still, ten years after its
introduction, often fails is when people copy e-mail
messages into the bodies of new e-mail addresses. Quite
often, you see text encoded according to the e-mail heading
rules for non-ASCII characters in the bodies of such
messages.

The conclusion of what I have written above is that there
will maybe be a need to extend the existing e-mail
standards, so that the e-mail address of especially From
and Sender fields can be specified in a dual format, with
both the national and the international (ASCII) name
specified at the same time. Is this something IETF should
begin thinking about? Or is it something IETF has already
started thinking about?

It is not a simple problem to solve, especially if you
want both backwards compatibility with existing mail,
and something user-friendly, preferally user-friendly
even for people using mail programs which do not support
dual e-mail addresses.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/