Re: [idn] IDNs in email message bodies

["Maynard Kang" <maynard@pobox.org.sg>]

> My recipient now has your address in ACE form in a message body.
> If she replies directly to you, and pastes that address back
> into the headers of the outgoing message, all is still well, as
> long as her MUA is smart enough to not try to apply your "step
> 1" conversion to something that is already in ACE form.   But
> suppose that, instead, she translates my message into Arabic or

I assume that when you say "translate to Arabic or Chinese" you mean it in a linguistic sense (as opposed to doing encoding conversion).

> Chinese and then sends it, especially if she does so using a
> non-Unicode charset (permissible, and, indeed, common in message
> bodies) or, worse, has that translation performed by an
> automatic translator that has not been "taught" to detect ACE
> strings in running text (note that, in the general case, they
> cannot be detected and discriminated from discussions of ACE
> with perfect accuracy).  
> 
> Care to guess the odds on your address surviving?  
> 


For all purposes, an ACE domain name present in a message should be treated as arbitrary data by any translation engine (whether human or machine), and hence MUST NOT translate that ACE string into Arabic and Chinese together with the rest of the message content.

Then again, having said that, I would love to see a translation engine handle an English-to-Arabic translation of "bq--badexample.com" (I think this is actually a valid race string).

But you are right in that there is no way to discern an ACE-string from other data with perfect accuracy. Perhaps we need an escaping mechanism for this.

maynard