Extending news to EAI

There is now an experimental protocol for UTF-8 headers in Email (RFC5335
and its relations). This was the product of the IMA WG. There has been
recent discussion of applying this to Netnews, and the conclusion seems to
be that the IMA WG is not the place to do this, and that a private draft
would be the way to do this. However, this list would be a reasonable
place to discuss it.

Essentially, under this protocol, UTF-8 may be freely used in Email
headers, but a downgrading mechanism is needed whenever mail passes to a
server that does not advertise the UTF8SMTP capability.

This is much what the USEFOR WG wanted to do in its earlier days, but the
decision was then taken to postpone it until the base documents were
complete, and then to bring it up again as an Experimental protocol. So
maybe now is the time to embark on it.

It is much easier with Netnews than with Email, since the underlying
transport (whether NNTP or UUCP) is already 8-bit clean. I would not
expect it to become the norm on the Big-8 groups for quite some time, but
it would be very useful for National hierarchies, such as the Scandinavian
ones where the inability to have Newsgroup Names with their own special
characters in them is a right pain (apparently).

So the experimental protocol would start off with the extensions allowed
by RFC5535, and then add UTF-8 in the Newsgroups header. It would be up to
individual hierarchies to encourage deployment of the experiment within
their groups.

It has already been established that the existing transport mechanisms