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

2003-10-29 23:37:58
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:33:31 +0800, Tan Tin Wee said:
And if they need to send email to outsiders, then they would
send in ASCII email address, as routinely as they would

OK.. I get that part.  Now for the big question:  You're there in this
Mongolian intranet, and find you need to ask me a technical question,
so my address gets entered in ascii. OK so far.  You now decide you
need to cc: somebody on the intranet so they know I've been asked.

1) What does that person do with my ascii-fied address?
2) How do I do a 'reply all' to both of you?

3) How is your From: address encoded so it's usable *BOTH* from where
I am and from where your co-worker is?  

3a) Can you achieve goal (3) while using the same From: as you would use
if you were mailing ONLY to the intranet (so people don't have to maintain
2 differently encoded values for your address for filtering purposes, etc).

If whatever Mongolia was doing was guaranteed to stay in Mongolia, it wouldn't
be an issue.  However, people inside the enclave *will* want to communicate
with outsiders as well - and the instant you allow an e-mail to cross the
border, you have to get all these types of issues sorted out.

Mark Crispin's point was that currently, knowledge of Latin glyphs *is*
assumed, and as far as anybody has evidenced, this hypothetical Mongolian
intranet with many non-Latin-aware users is still hypothetical - and with no
evidence saying there actually IS one in the works someplace.  So Mark quite
reasonably pointed out that it may very well make more *engineering* sense to
simply train the very small number of users who don't know Latin glyphs than to
come up with some very convoluted scheme that annoys everybody else.

The tail has to be a certain size before it's able to wag the dog. 

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