Re: [Tools-discuss] EAI, threat or menace, was Dates added: 6 and 7 Dec

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2021, Robert Sparks wrote:
>> By IDN support, do you mean EAI mail with UTF-8 on both sides of an e-mail 
>> address, ...

> Indeed, and yes, we mean the former - it's a project that's had action on and 
> off for several years. Its time to look again to see if we can finish taking 
> the step.

FYI, ICANN is also planning to add EAI support to their Mailman lists, 
although I am reasonably sure they have no clue how hard it is.  It is 
also on the roadmap for Mailman 3 although I doubt they will do anything 
soon unless someone gives it to them.

I can say more about this in December but my strong advice, having been 
doing EAI work for the UASG for several years, is first to enable EAI on 
the IETF's regular mail system.  In theory this is just turning on a 
postfix flag,  In practice, things break and we will learn interesting 
things from what breaks and what is involved in fixing it.

While the smoke clears we can figure out whether it is plausble to EAI-ize 
our mailing lists.  The first 90% of the work is enabling EAI features on 
inbound and outbound mail and the archive which I would expect to be 
fairly straightforward.  The other 90% is that if you want your EAI 
support to be useful, there has to be some way for EAI and ASCII users to 
be on the same list, to arrange to deliver messages from EAI users to 
ASCII mail systems that do not handle EAI mail, and make it at least 
somewhat possible to reply, preferably without making things worse for 
people at systems like Gmail which have ASCII addreses but can send and 
receive EAI mail.  The EAI working group tried to solve the gateway 
problem for a decade and failed, so it seems unlikely that we will do much 
better.  (Needless to say, any solution starting "You can just ..." has 
been tried and failed already.)

R's,
John