Re: [idn] UTF-8 as the long-term IDN solution

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Keith Moore writes:
> You stubbornly refuse to fix qmail to comply with the standards, 

Wrong as usual. Please read RFC 2821, section 2.4: ``In general, a relay
SMTP SHOULD assume that the message content it has received is valid
and, assuming that the envelope permits doing so, relay it without
inspecting that content.''

You may reasonably argue that message creators today shouldn't use 8-bit
bytes in header fields. But you are being a fool when you claim that
MTAs must, or even should, reject 8-bit bytes.

> Fortunately, most deployed MTAs block 8-bit characters in message 
> headers, which keeps people from depending on them.

Wrong on both counts. Europeans rely heavily on ISO 8859-1 in Subject
lines, for example. The only reason that we're suffering through the
incompatible change from 8859-1 to UTF-8 is that 8859-1 is missing the
characters that billions of people want.

---Dan