Re: Algorithm for comparing two email addresses (draft-ietf-smime-3850bis)?

Barry Leiba <leiba@watson.ibm.com> Thu, 08 January 2009 19:11 UTC

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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:11:36 -0500
From: Barry Leiba <leiba@watson.ibm.com>
To: Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@Sun.COM>, apps-discuss@ietf.org
Subject: Re: Algorithm for comparing two email addresses (draft-ietf-smime-3850bis)?
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Cc: Tim Polk <tim.polk@nist.gov>, smime-chairs@tools.ietf.org, draft-ietf-smime-3850bis@tools.ietf.org
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I'm with Paul on the DISCUSS question.  The proper method for comparing addresses 
has to be specified somewhere (I'm not sure your algorithm is even complete; what 
about RFC 2047 encodings; what about Unicode issues when we go to EAI?), but it's 
not here, and this shouldn't be held up for it.  At the most, I'd ask that they 
put in a notation that the right side SHOULD be treated as ASCII-case-insensitive.

As to where such a document belongs, I suggest EAI: since it's changing the 
rules, it should probably document them.

[For what it's worth, I think this is related to the issue of mail loops in 
sieve-notify-mailto, and sieve-vacation, along with other instances in other 
places.  There may be a need for a BCP about certain aspects of dealing with 
email, and it needs to be tackled.  But we can't just pick some unfortunate 
victim that happens to mention the problem and say, basically, "You touched it; 
you fix it."]

Barry

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