Re: [ietf-smtp] Should we update an RFC if people refuse to implement parts of it ?

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Tue, 25 May 2021 18:29 UTC

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Date: Tue, 25 May 2021 14:29:45 -0400
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [ietf-smtp] Should we update an RFC if people refuse to implement parts of it ?
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It appears that John C Klensin  <john-ietf@jck.com> said:
>It would certainly be appropriate to either revise the spec or,
>better from my point of view, create a short applicability
>statement that explains the reasoning behind the SHOULD and the
>circumstances under which it would be sensible to ignore it. ...

>The thing that sometimes gets lost in "let's make the spec
>conform to what implementations are doing" discussions in this
>area is that there is an assumption behind the whole collection
>of SMTPUTF8 specs, namely that the world really wanted non-ASCII
>addressing and header field values. ...

This may seem like splitting hairs but there is a difference between
header fields that users see and fields that they don't.  Message-IDs
are still generally ASCII in EAI messages, and I don't see any
benefit from making the domain names in trace headers U-labels rather
than A-labels.

I'm not getting any pushback on Return-Path which really does need
to be UTF-8 is it's an EAI address.  I think the few MTAs that put
a FOR clause in the Received header put EAI addresses there, too.

R's,
John