ietf-smtp
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Re: Last Call: draft-crocker-email-arch (Internet Mail Architecture) to Proposed Standard

2009-02-27 15:21:38

Hello,

Section 6.3 of draft-crocker-email-arch is about Internationalization. Quoting the draft:

  "Because its origins date back to the use of ASCII, Internet Mail has
   had an ongoing challenge to support the wide range of necessary
   international data representations.  For a discussion of this topic,
   see [MAIL-I18N]."

MAIL-I18N is a report on "Using International Characters in Internet Mail" published in 1998. There is an existing IETF WG working on email internationalization. The EAI WG published a SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email Addresses as an Experimental RFC and there are some existing implementations. I don't think that it is worth referencing MAIL-I18N when there is newer work in the area of email internationalization.

I suggest having the following for Section 6.3 with appropriate references to RFC 5336.

   Because its origins date back to the use of ASCII, Internet Mail has
   had an ongoing challenge to support the wide range of necessary
   international data representations.  RFC 5336 specifies an SMTP
   extension, as an Experimental Protocol, for transport and delivery
   of email messages with internationalized email addresses or header
   information.

There is an issue in that it is an Experimental Protocol and it may not belong in a document about the existing Internet Mail architecture. The alternative is to mention the ongoing EAI work to standardize internationalized email.

Could you please comment about this?

Regards,
-sm