Re: [idn] IDNs in email message bodies

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com> wrote:

> ...if I paste something out of the display that has been rendered into
> native script, I'm probably going to get the native script in my text,
> not the ACE form.

That is what I would expect to happen.  I would be very surprised if
I highlighted Arabic text and when I pasted it, it became ACE.  I
think users expect copying and pasting to be a simple, intuitive,
what-you-see-is-what-you-get operation.

> If the email address (local and domain parts) is, e.g., encoded in ACE
> from Arabic, and a message body ends up being sent in Arabic text,
> I would predict a good deal of user irritation if the email address
> appeared in that running text in ASCII (with the added irritations of
> embedding left-to-right text in a right-to-left script stream) because
> it was pasted from a "from:" field rather than being keyed in.

If the person doing the copy/paste was using an IDN-aware MUA with
support for Arabic, then the From: field was showing Arabic text,
and that is what got copied and pasted, not ACE, so there will be no
irritation.  With a non-IDN-aware MUA, or one that doesn't support
Arabic, the ACE will be displayed in the From: field, and so the ACE
will be copied and pasted, and the recipient will be irritated (but the
sender will be too, which may motivate an upgrade of the MUA).

AMC