Re: [EAI] UTF-8 in Message-IDs

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, October 05, 2011 11:10 +0100 Charles Lindsey
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> As to whether it is any of this WG's business, it is certainly
> NOT the business of this WG to put obstacles in the way of
> other mail-like protocols which might want to follow the EAI
> path.

Charles,

The job of this WG is to make a specific set of extensions to
allow internationalized addresses, envelopes, and headers work
well in Internet mail.   That job includes making the extensions
as obvious, internally consistent, and deployable as possible
for Internet email use on the public Internet.  Like any other
change, including the original adoption of the SMTP extension
model and MIME, almost anything that is done is likely to cause
some difficulties for gateways to other mail systems (and
mail-like protocols) and/or, depending on how the gateways
behave, on user agents in those other systems.

Trying to consider the perceived needs of every other mail-like
protocol in order to avoid doing something that its implementers
might consider an obstruction leads to paralysis and possibly
madness.  Because there are IETF Standards-Track documents, NNTP
gets some extra consideration, but not much -- the job of the WG
remains Internet email, not, in your words, "mail-like
protocols".

Speaking personally, I would be much more sympathetic to the
position you are taking had I not seen all sorts of chaos caused
over the years by news systems believing that netnews
Message-IDs could be compared, uncritically, to Internet email
Message-IDs and actions taken on the results.  But those
disruptions have occurred and presumably continue to occur.
People live with them, and I don't see the disruptions this
change to Message-IDs are likely to cause being any worse.  YMMD.

Again speaking personally, I would have preferred a "don't
change anything that cannot be proven to be necessary" approach
by the WG, even if it resulted in somewhat more complex rules
about what header fields could have non-ASCII content and which
could not.    That opinion was almost certainly influenced by my
having spent a lot of my life in the gateway world (although not
with NNTP).  The WG disagreed, favoring a less complex model in
which substantially any header field can contain non-ASCII
material, and Joseph has declared consensus.  I've accepted that
conclusion; unless you have something that is actually new to
add to the discussion, I suggest you do too.

best,
   john