Re: [ietf-smtp] Are A-label and U-label addresses supposed to be equivalent ?

[Jiankang Yao <[e-mail]>]

From: John C Klensin
Date: 2020-07-12 11:42
To: John R Levine; ietf-smtp
CC: YAO Jiankang
Subject: Re: [ietf-smtp] Are A-label and U-label addresses supposed to be equivalent ?
>(adding Jiankang since I'm not sure he is on this list)
>

Dear John,
Thanks for adding me. I will add more comments after yours.

> > --On Saturday, July 11, 2020 22:30 -0400 John R Levine
> <[e-mail]> wrote:

> > Let's say I had these two addresses, which are the same except
> > that one has a U-label and the other has the equivalent
> > A-label.  They're both non-ASCII addresses since the mailbox
> > name is in Chinese
> > 
> > 用户1@后缀.services.net
> > 用户[e-mail]
> > 
> > Presumably if you're sending mail to those addresses, you
> > should send them to the same place.

> Given the way the interactions between RFC 6531, RFC 5321, and
> IDNA work, you have little choice: the sending MTA needs to go
> through IDNA to get an FQDN that can actually get looked up and,
> after that, the place where it sends (or tries to send) the
> message is all about the MX records. 
> 

> >   But on the final delivery
> > MTA, is that one address or two?  Different mail software
> > implement it differently.

I think that it SHOULD implement it in the same way. That is to treat these two addresses to be same. 

用户1@后缀.services.net
用户[e-mail]


Besides john's example,
there is another example:

Do we regard these two addreses to be same?
[e-mail]
[e-mail]


I think that it is yes.
[e-mail] is another form of [e-mail].

For the same reason, 
用户1@后缀.services.net in another form of 
用户[e-mail]




> > Looking at RFCs 6530 and 6531 I get the impression the authors
> > assumed they'd be the same but I don't see anywhere it
> > explicitly says so.

>Speaking as one of the authors, I don't think we discussed it
>(rather than assuming anything).  There is a specific reason why
>we probably didn't, which goes to the "what questions are you
>really asking" issue.  The core SMTPUTF8 specs rather strongly
>discourage using anything but native character UTF-8 strings
>anywhere other than in the SMTP client when it is trying to
>figure the next hop out.  
>


Besides john's explanation,
RFC6531 has some clarification.

Section 3.7.  Additional ESMTP Changes and Clarifications

   The information carried in the mail transport process involves
   addresses ("mailboxes") and domain names in various contexts in
   addition to the MAIL and RCPT commands and extended alternatives to
   them.  In general, the rule is that, when RFC 5321 specifies a
   mailbox, this SMTP extension requires UTF-8 form to be used for the
   entire string.  When RFC 5321 specifies a domain name, the
   internationalized domain name SHOULD be in U-label form if the
   SMTPUTF8 extension is supported; otherwise, it SHOULD be in A-label
   form.

So in the email address, both U-label and A-label are different forms for the Internationalized Domain Names.


Best Regards
Jiankang Yao