Discussion of RFC 2822 ()

Keith Moore | 3 May 1993 22:09

Re: Non-ASCII Internet addresses?

This proposal will do nothing to increase the ability of people to
communicate over the Internet.  In fact, it will make it more difficult for
them to do so.

I have no doubt that many users want to be able to use eight-bit names in
email addresses.  However, these users may not know how much this will cost
them.

A proposal such as you describe is easy to define and not terribly difficult
to implement.  The difficult part is educating the entire Internet about it,
and getting the software widely deployed.

Everyone in the Internet will suffer if such a proposal is adopted.  What's
worse is that no new functionality is gained for that pain.  A significant
fraction of the Internet may 'benefit' because they can use their login id
for their email address.  However, the majority of the Internet will gain
nothing.  And everyone will lose because there will be another piece of
"black magic" that users have to know to use email effectively.

By all means, let's work on a directory service that allows us to address
people by their real names, and let's interface it to our UAs.  When that
happens there will be some pain, but we will gain something incredibly
useful in return.

Keith Moore

headers

Ned Freed | 4 May 1993 00:38

RE: Non-ASCII Internet addresses?

> This proposal will do nothing to increase the ability of people to
> communicate over the Internet.  In fact, it will make it more difficult for
> them to do so.

This point has been brought home to me rather forcefully in recent weeks by the
troubles we've had in getting support for the existing header extensions as
well as the SMTP service extensions into place. Despite years of experience in
this area, I among others seem to have underestimated the difficulty by at
least an order of magnitude.

> ...

> Everyone in the Internet will suffer if such a proposal is adopted.  What's
> worse is that no new functionality is gained for that pain.  A significant
> fraction of the Internet may 'benefit' because they can use their login id
> for their email address.  However, the majority of the Internet will gain
> nothing.  And everyone will lose because there will be another piece of
> "black magic" that users have to know to use email effectively.

Making e-mail addresses more complex (even if this translates to simply making
them longer) is never a good idea unless there's a huge gain at the end of the
effort. Such a gain was in fact realized the last time the structure of email
addresses was seriously tampered with (i.e. the addition of domains).

And as the experience with domains shows, such an extension is sure to run up
against limits in something somewhere, and all we get out of it is another
exercise in finger-pointing and eventually another set of hacks to work around
the problem area. Words simply cannot express my distaste for such a result.

The beauty of the existing header extensions is fourfold: (1) Users don't have

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