Re: [dane] email canonicalization for SMIMEA owner names

"John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Thu, 11 December 2014 22:40 UTC

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Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 22:40:07 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [dane] email canonicalization for SMIMEA owner names
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>Well, domains could publish the local-part canonicalization function
>they use, or, rather, a small index of well-known canonicalization
>functions.

Mail systems do fuzzy matching on local parts in an enormous number of
ways.  But you will find that once you get past "map it all to lower
case" the rest of them are all out at the tail of the curve.

I don't know anyone other than Gmail that treats dots as noise
characters (bobsmith@gmail.com, Bob.Smith@gmail.com, and
B.o.B.s.M.i.T.h@gmail.com are all the same mailbox) but since Gmail is
such a large player, do they get their own special case?

Personally, I think that:

a) Viktor's approach is terrible, and

2) it's the best we're going to do so we might as well use it.

R's,
John