Re: First strawman for UTF-8 headers proposal

[Steve Hole <steve.hole@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 14:14:12 +0100 Simon Josefsson <jas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Both IMAP and POP(3) support capabilities, so it would not be
> difficult to add a UTF8HEADER capability.  I'm skeptical about that
> approach though, there are many protocols that transfer e-mail, adding
> a capability negotiation mechanism, and a new capability, to all of
> them is not practical.

Yes, it would be difficult.   Just because the protocol supports extension 
does not mean that it is easy to extend ... particularly in ways like 
this.   It will take a long time to deploy code that both handles the 
display issues (which we have to do no matter what) AND requires protocol 
extensions.   This is because both the client and the server have to be 
appropriately extended.   In 13 years of implementation experience with 
IMAP clients and servers, not one extension has deployed either quickly or
universally.

You would be much better served to work within the constraints of the 
existing protocol if possible.   I'm sure that could be done with IMAP 
which already supports UTF-7 encodings.   You'd likely have to do a 
mapping of some kind.   Good luck with POP.

Please don't get me wrong.   An extension is possible and maybe is the 
right thing to do.  But please don't pretend that it is either simple to 
engineer or (more importantly) to deploy, because they aren't.   The same 
goes for SMTP as well ... even more so.

Cheers.
---
Steve Hole
Chief Technology Officer - Billing and Payment Systems
ACI Worldwide
<mailto:holes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Phone: 780-424-4922