Re: Non-latin email addresses dangerous?

MANY years ago email and email address were truly 7 bit. With the 8th
bit being parity or not existing at all.  Or the 7-BIT ASCII bits bit 
shifted so
you could get five  7-bit ASCII characters into one word of a 36 bit 
computer.
For many years email address have been 8-bit. With the 8th bit set to zero.
The problem is mostly the MUAs not able to display those addresses
and users not being able to read them when they are a language
not known to the user.

If the format of email changes then conforming MUAs must comply
with what ever the headers-ng look like. So the MUA is not
going to be the problem in mail-ng as we can assume that 100%
of all existing MUA can not already handle the mail-ng format.

Currently if I get email that is non-english, I have configured my
email filter (procmail) to throw it in the trash anyway as I can not
read it even if my MUA displays it correctly.

If email addresses were non-8-bit-ASCII  and in a language that
the user could not read, then the user would start associating
something else with that user - their name or some other
identifier.

And do we all really need to be able to read a persons email address
when we can not already converse with that person because of language?
If I ever learn Spanish  then I might care if I knew how to pronounce
an email addrsses that had some ~ glyphs above a letter or two.
I can still copy/paste it into my address book.

--

Doug Royer                     |   http://INET-Consulting.com
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