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

> 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.
If so it will be completely nonstandard, since IDN is clearly
scoped to apply to domain names only.

> 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.
Everyone who has participated in the IDN work is well aware of
the implications.

> 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.
Please. This is an implementation failure, not a MIME failure.

> 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?
The IETF started thinking about this long before the IDN work started. Any
number of drafts have been posted about it over the years. The latest one I've
seen, which leverages the IDN work, is draft-hoffman-imaa-02.txt. There's also
a mailing list, see http://www.imc.org/ietf-imaa/.

                                        Ned