Re: [idn] RE: An idn protocolfor consideration in making therequirements

[ned.freed@innosoft.com]

> About mailservers:

> When SMTP is extended to handle international domains, it will most
> certainly not be extended in a way that allows e-mail to disappear.

It won't if I have anything to say about it. However, it is surprisingly
hard to prevent this outcome, and the "just-send-UTF8" approach absolutely does
generate this outcome in a substantial number of cases.

> The adopted solution will probably negotiate what protocol to use and
> bounce the mail if the server can't handle it. Thus we might have
> bounced mail but not disappeared mail. If your mail bounce you simply
> have to use an ASCII address instead.

If it only were this simple... The problem is that you can end up in
situations where a message cannot move forward and also cannot get back to
the originator. This is where mail is lost.

> During a transition period of one or a few years few people will want
> to use non-ASCII addresses as sender addresses. If mailservers can't
> handle non-ASCII domains after that, you either have to choose to use
> ASCII only or not communicate with these people. It's not any
> different from mailservers which refuse to accept 8 bit e-mails.

Actually, it is quite different in any number of ways, several of which I've
already described in previous messages. Those of us who have substantive
operational experience with both the "just send 8" attempts of the late 80s as
well as the 8bitMIME experience of the 90s know that things are not as
simple nor as straightforward as you claim here.

				Ned