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Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)

2003-10-28 21:52:12

Given that we have gone through this paradigm debate several times over the
last decade, I am hard-pressed to understand why anyone would think that it
will be productive to do it again.

because
- email addresses are much more heavily used by humans than URLs are,
  and the impact of an IDNA-like scheme on email addresses is greater
  than for other apps using DNS names
- email is more disruption-sensitive than most apps (every MTA that a
  message passes through is another opportunity for failure)
- people expect to use their names in email local-parts more often 
  than they expect to use enterprise names as DNS domain names
- matching/uniqueness issues for personal names (thus email local-parts)
  are somewhat different than for enterprise names (especially given 
  influence of trademark laws on the latter)
- having IDNA for the domain portion of an address provides a useful hook
  for looking up mappings from I18Ned local-parts to unique portable
  identifiers

because failure to actually do analysis on the problem is irresponsible and
inconsistent with the engineering that we're supposed to be doing

(note this is about why it's appropriate to analyze the specific problem
at hand rather than blindly pursue a particular approach - not about the
merits of John's proposal - which I haven't finished reading yet)

Keith