[EAI] Unicode / ASCII fallback mappings?

[Shawn Steele <[e-mail]>]

I realize that a UTF-8 email address and the ASCII fallback for that address are left to the server to figure out, but I was wondering if anyone had any preconceptions?

I can think of 3 basic ways to solve generating ASCII addresses: 1) Some sort of encoding mechanism that is algorithmic and likely makes an unreadable ASCII address, 2) aliasing, where aliasing happens automagically, like perhaps Cyrillic to ASCII transliteration, and 3) aliasing where the ASCII alias doesn't necessarily correlate with the native-script form.

My preconception is that the last is the most useful, unless the native script has well-defined transiliteration to Latin rules.

Furthermore I'd expect that when I created a new account on something like live mail/gmail/yahoo mail, that it'd be nice to get prompted for both the Unicode and ASCII aliases, possibly with a generate ASCII alias button for users that aren't as familier with that form.

Lastly, I'd assume that "enabling" EAI on such a system, such as with a Chinese ISP, would mean that when I log in with an existing ASCII address, I could be prompted with a "Get your chinese alias now!" button, so that I wouldn't have to make a new account or lose service/migrate messages, etc. from my old account.

It occurred to me that what I think is obvious may not be what everyone/anyone else is thinking.  Does anyone care to share any other options or whether they agree?  I know that earlier Mark had suggested a punycode form, but I'd assumed that most end-users would prefer a more friendly alias.  One that would make sense on a double-sided business card for example.

-Shawn