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

["Charles Lindsey" <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 03:34:35 +0100, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:

> --On Monday, October 03, 2011 23:51 +0200 Julien ÉLIE
> <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> For what is worth, I do not think there would be any major
>> issue with INN (a news server) because message-IDs are
>> internally "hashed" after having parsed them.  They can be
>> retrievable.
>>
>> The problem is the transition period.  INN currently rejects
>> any message whose Message-ID: header field does not comply
>> with RFC 5536. It also does not want to search for such
>> message-IDs.
>> ...
> Julien,
>
> The edge case of a message with a non-ASCII Message-ID but no
> other non-ASCII header fields aside, how would the news servers
> you and Charles are familiar with respond to non-ASCII addresses
> or header fields more generally?

They would propagate fine. User agents that could display them would do  
so. Making EAI an official extension to Netnews would be quite simple -  
mainly a matter of inventing a Newsgroups: header and doing something  
about normalization of Message-IDs if there were to contain UTF-8 (which  
is why I opposed allowing them in EAI without some normalization rules  
being provided at the same time).
>
> Note also that, to some extent, this is not a news reader
> problem at all but a gateway issue between Internet mail and
> news.  If articles originate in news and move to mail, there is
> no issue because they will be ASCII.  So the question is what
> the gateways in the "to news" direction do.  If they reject
> messages with non-ASCII headers (Message-IDs or otherwise), the
> readers won't see such messages... and the problem is really no
> different from an attempt to send an extended mail message to a
> server that is not UTF8SMTP-capable.

I suspect that even if EAI does not find its way 'officially' into  
Netnews, it will still just happen anyway (probably in selected newsgroups  
where its use will become common). The transport mechanism it already  
8-bit clean, so it should "just work".

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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