Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

[Einar Stefferud <stef@nma.com>]

I am definitely not the party to be satisfied here;-)...

I only jumped in to remind that the issues of IETF Message Bodies and 
Message Headers are separate and very different, so that the history 
of the "just send 8 bits" appeared to perhaps need some refreshment.

I think that Keith is talking along the same lines, but beyond what I 
have said, I am not able to contribute more.

I have stopped doing IETF work since the Chicago IETF where I 
finished my work with MHTML, and no longer had travel support for any 
more IETF work.

And then I also retired, more or less, mostly.

So, having had my say for whatever it might have been worth,
I would just as soon be omitted from the rest of this discussion.

Cheers;-)...\Stef


At 12:20 AM -0500 4/2/02, Keith Moore wrote:
>  > I believe that Einar could be most easily satisfied with something along
>  > the lines of a UTF8HEADERS ESMTP extension, which would specify both
>  > that 8 bit character are permitted in the header and that those
>  > characters MUST be interpreted as UTF-8.
>
>there are lots of problems with this idea.  for instance, there's no
>way for SMTP to know whether the recipient's MUA can deal with
>utf-8 even in 2047 encoded form, to say nothing about unencoded form.
>and it's not as simple as saying just use utf-8 in the message header -
>there's also the question of which characters are legal and which aren't,
>which ones are separator characters, which ones are white space, etc.
>
>then consider that, except for the abliity to have non-ascii email
>addresses, there's no functional advantage to having raw utf-8 in headers.
>there might be a slight win to having a more efficient encoder, but
>MUAs would still have to implement both utf-8 and 2047 for many more years.
>
>let's get the details of non-ascii email addresses worked out before
>we start spewing utf-8 in random places in the message header.
>
>Keith