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Re: rough sketch of a potential solution


On Monday, November 17, 2003, at 03:08 AM, Martin Duerst wrote:

Log file format is in any event a locale-specific issue, so it's not clear
that it would be appropriate for an MTA to log an unencoded UTF-8 address to a
log file on a system that used some other charset in its locale. 

First, it's not a system that uses a locale, it's just a certain
user/application/whatever.

Well, that depends on whether the application maintains its own log file or whether it uses a common logging facility like syslog.

In addition to that, assuming addresses in many different (languages
and) scripts, you better use UTF-8 or another encoding that is able
to encode all of Unicode/ISO 10646.

I still view logging as a local matter, however I would have no problem with recommending that MTAs that log addresses do so in a way that permits display of addresses without decoding if local system tools and the log facility permit this.

> Essentially this proposal appear to add a i18n-layer for e-mail, a
> "presentation" layer if you wish, on top of RFC 2822 and SMTP. While
> this may be preferable for ASCII people, having i18n as an "add-on"
> appear rather fragile to me. But that's only my initial reaction.

Even if we were designing a new mail system from scratch to handle these
requirements, I think we would need a lookup across the net at the time
that the message is composed (or submitted) in order to handle the case where
at least one recipient can't transcribe the sender's "native" address. 

As I tried to explain in another mail, I'm not really clear on this.
The sender should not send an address that the receiver doesn't know
how to read.

The problem is that there may be multiple recipients and the sender may not know which recipients can read which languages, or even if this is known, the sender may not know alternative addresses for some of the recipients. Consider a reply to a message that was originally sent to a list of recipients, some of whom the sender knows and some of whom the sender doesn't know. Either the original message or the reply could be in multiple languages (say with multipart/alternative)

Keith