Over the last ten years, I explained a zillion times to my
management, workmates, etc. why e-mail addresses cannot
contain accented characters, only to be asked when the IT
department of the organization is going to "fix it". This is
the archetypical example of an issue that has been known
since the days of RFC821/822. Yet, work to address this has
only started a year ago, although I am conscious there were
some intermediate step needed, like Unicode.
For this to work, we need a way to display that address on
devices which do not have the complete set of Unicode glyphs
installed. And we also need a way to display a representation
of the address that can be used to unambiguously input the
address on a device which does not understand the full set
of Unicode glyphs.
This was discussed a couple of days ago in this message
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg47925.html
regarding deprecating RFC 1345 because it is the wrong solution
to the problem.
In fact, it may be necessary to attach a language tag (defined
in RFC 4646 and 4647) to these addresses in order to make this
fully possible. For instance, there is a Norwegian mans' name
which is usually written Hakon in English. In Norwegian, the
letter a is written with a small ring attached to the top. This
ring represents that the name is pronounced more like Hokon than
Hakon. Nevertheless, it is standard for people to us a double a
to represent this glyph (a-ring) when writing Norwegian with
devices which do not have the a-ring glyph. But Haakon is even
more misleading to English eyes.
In order for an email display and entry device to fully make sense
of addresses which contain a glyph not available on the device,
it may be necessary to know both the language tag of the device
user, as well as the language tag of the address.
I'm sure that many people are working on this problem, but most
of this work is happening outside of the IETF. Perhaps even in
commercial ventures like Mozilla's new email company,
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2007-09-17.html
--Michael Dillon
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