Re: Can we back up a bit and ask some basic questions? Analternate model

[Roy Badami <roy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 > > I'm not sure that you understand what I was proposing.  A
 > > better analogy would be to pose the question: would it have
 > > been a good thing for ESMTP and 8BITMIME to have been defined
 > > concurrently with the base MIME standards?  (That isn't
 > > intended as a loaded question; "No, it wouldn't have made any
 > > difference" is a perfectly valid answer.)
 > 
 > How would "basically, they were" grab you as an answer?

Thanks, that's interesting.  I'd always assumed that 8BITMIME was
defined much later (probably because MTAs get updated more slowly than
MUAs, so I first encountered it much later).

For the record, I'm largely happy with both IDNA and the base IMAA propo

 > 	* UTF-8, while more common and better known than
 > 	punycode, is really not a very efficient encoding [...]

 > 	* There are more efficient encodings than either [...]

I have to say that I don't believe coding efficiency is incredibly
important to e-mail, particularly coding efficiently of addresses
(except insofar as we need to allow useful IMAs within existing
protocols that contain length restrictions).

The main reason why I think this will inevitably happen in the future
(regardless of whether this forum mandates it) is that in the long
term we will move to a message body which (by default) is just a block
of UTF-8, with no requirements for special coding in any headers or in
the body.  Once this happens, and punycode is unnecessary within the
message, it would seem to me to make sence to eliminate it from
(2)821, too.

I guess this is outside the scope of the IMA list, however...

 > 	over-clever MTA author to say "if I can send IMAA
 > 	without negotiation, and negotiation fails, I can either
 > 	go to all that downgrading trouble, which might not work
 > 	anyway, or I can just send the 8bit stuff, which might
 > 	get through.  The latter is a lot less work, so..."

I'm not sure that the situations are comparable.  The reason that MTA
authors do this with 8-bit to 7-bit conversion is partly that it
almost invariably works, so they can get away with it.  Indeed, Dan
Bernstein has some arguments (that I don't entirely agree with) that
it works _better_ than following the RFCs (ie at least one author of a
major MTA made a considered decision to disregard this particular
requirement because in his opinion his approach interoperated better
with the rest of the Internet).

I don't believe the situation would be the same with IMAs -- I
strongly suspect that just-send-8 for RFC-(2)821 commands and
RFC-(2)822 headers simply won't work in most cases...

	-roy