Re: [Nmh-workers] EAI?

[David Levine]

Resurrecting an old topic, Email Address Internationalization (EAI).
The original message is at
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2015-08/msg00000.html

It doesn't mention RFC 6531, SMTP Extension for Internationalized
Email, which is what this message is mostly about.

Ken wrote:

> - SMTPUTF8 looks relatively straightforward to implement, at least.

I've done that on a branch, smtputf8.  I'd like to include it in 1.7.

One design issue is how should the user enable sending of 8-bit
(UTF-8 encoded) addresses.  My first attempt was two explicit steps,
one to disable RFC 2047 encoding of addresses in the draft message
and the other to instruct post, via send, to use SMTPUTF8, if
supported by the SMTP server.  In terms of What now? responses:

    What now? mime -headerencoding utf-8
    What now? send -eai

But to make it more convenient and remove potential mismatches, that
-eai switch in the second step could be removed, so it would just be
send as usual.  post would look at the draft and automatically use
SMTPUTF8 if it has any 8-bit header field bodies.

Downside would be if the user manually put 8-bit characters into a
header field by mistake, post would then use SMTPUTF8 (if supported
by the SMTP server).  But I think that's really the user's problem,
and not such a big one, and much better than having to enable this
with two steps.

Preferences?

It'd be up to the user to know if their SMTP server supports
SMTPUTF8.  If it doesn't and they try to use it anyway, post will
report an error and not send the message.

David