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Re: [Fwd: Last Call: draft-crocker-email-arch (Internet Mail Architecture) to Proposed Standard]

2009-02-27 08:12:05

A fine document and I will be glad when it's cast in stone. We've wasted too much time on too many terminology mistakes and too much fuzzy blah.

Four points, one small and three very very small.

1. The subject of this message refers to the document as the "Internet Mail Architecture". I think that's a fine title, both accurate and descriptive, and _the_ internet mail architecture is what needs description. The footer of each page uses a different title, which I think is inferior.

2. The localpart is opaque, the document says.

   The portion to the left of the at-sign contains a string that is
   globally opaque and is called the <local-part>.  It is to be
   interpreted only by the entity specified by the address's domain
   name.

That's not entirely practical. Anyone who implements address-book search, "unsubscribe" handlers and code that needs to look up addresses will find that one has to do lookups case-insensitively.

I would like to have an additional paragraph in section 3.1, stating that although the localpart may or may not be case-sensitive, as the domain owner pleases, some software and users do treat it as if it were case-insensitive anyway. Software MUST preserve the case, and SHOULD do address lookups case-insensitively.

(I don't know the EAI well enough... does the EAI make local-parts case-insensitive?)

3. Section 3.3 might mention the xn--blah document in a vague, non-binding way suitable to an experiment which may become more than an experiment, and on the other hand, may go away.

4. The really long paragraph on page 38 includes an unreadable sentence ("Modifying the field..."), and I'd like to break it in three anyway, before "As a User actor" and "Modifying the field".

Arnt

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