Re: [precis] spaces in usernames

[Alexey Melnikov <[e-mail]>]

On 05/03/2012 17:12, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> On 3/5/12 10:02 AM, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
>> On 03/03/2012 08:10, Alan DeKok wrote:
>>> Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>>>> Alexey and I are working on an I-D to replace SASLprep (RFC 4013). One
>>>> issue we found is that, in RFC 4013, spaces were allowed in usernames. I
>>>> know the framework document now allows spaces in passphrases, but I'm
>>>> wondering if we also want to allow spaces in usernames. Something to
>>>> discuss in Paris, perhaps...
>>>     In a theoretical sense, yes.
>>>
>>>     Practically, usernames are largely email addresses.  And I've rarely
>>> seen spaces used in practice.
>> Spaces are allowed in email addresses, if quoted. Of course no sane
>> person would pick an email address with spaces on the left hand side (as
>> this is unlikely to work in many places), but at least SMTP allows for
>> that.
>> (And then there are email addresses used for gatewaying from other
>> systems like X.400. Such email addresses can also contain spaces)
> It's rather unlikely that X.400 will be made Unicode-aware, right? ;-)
Actually, you might be surprised. X.400 names are based on X.500 and the 
latter is very much in active development to this day. And X.500 even 
has support for SASL now ;-).
>> I would be happy with discouraging spaces in usernames, but I don't
>> think we can just prohibit them.
> I tend to agree.