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

[Frank Ellermann <[e-mail]>]

On 17 August 2011 12:32, Charles Lindsey wrote:

> Returning now to email, the Message-ID is only important when used in the
> References and In-Reply-To headers, where is is generally used by MUAs for
> threading purposes. So the worst that can happen if Message-IDs get garbled
> in transport is that threading fails to work.

That includes the cute mailto:list@example?In-Rreply-To=unique@example use
to get correct threading in replies to messages in list archives.  Covered
in RFC 6068 section 6.1 and AFAICT invented by "pipermail" many years ago.

Likewise RFC 5538 section 6 used a crystal ball to claim that whatever EAI
will do, it won't touch Message-IDs for the spectacle of a news URI turned
into a news IRI without anybody knowing what happened, and what consequences
it might have on NNTP servers.  RFC 3977 section 10.3 "outstanding issues"
discusses newsgroup names in its i18n considerations, and I think EAI uses
some ABNF from this RFC.  Its Message-ID concept could live without an "@",
but otherwise <A-NOTGT> is "ASCII excluding '>'".  RFC 5536 section 4 does
not mention that "there be dragons" wrt "prettier" Message-IDs, because it
is easier to change the syntax at a low level in EAI and see what happens.

-Frank