On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 02:21:04PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
I beg to differ.
1. Even if 822's choice of charset were flawed, we still need
interoperation during the (probably very long) transition from 822 to
Mail-NG. It must be possible to write gateways.
No. It MAY be possible to write gateways. If you allow a gateway process,
you allow spam into the system, and that's what we're trying to avoid. I
don't see a gateway as being a "MUST" at all... It was possible to gateway
between uucp and smtp in the bad old days because the only difference really
was the addressing and lookup mechanisms. What we're discussing here is
something that needs to be much, much, much more radical.
2. While 822 is flawed in many ways, I don't see what would be gained by
(picking an example at random) using Cyrillic characters in the
message-id production I see on page 23 of RFC 2822. Latin seems just as
good and just as bad as Cyrillic there.
That's my point. We shouldn't care about which charset is being used,
providing the sender and recipient are both happy with it.
US-ASCII is special because of the need for interoperation/gatewaying with
822.
And that's the best argument I've seen yet for binning 822 - it won't handle
full Unicode. Why do we want something that we know nobody else wants any
more except for a few xenophobic english speakers?
--
Paul Robinson