On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 17:46 +0100, Peter J. Holzer wrote: > If somebody comes up with a good proposal I'm all for it.
Don't do it. I spent 40 minutes trying to find out about IDN yesterday before I made this suggestion then. So, here is a proposal. ---- proposal 1. Don't do anything until there is an SMTP RFC which covers IDN. I could not find anything although Klensin has written a couple of notes about using IDN (but not in SMTP, as far as I can tell). 2. If (1) is not good enough for you then write the RFC yourself. 3. If you *have* to support it, then don't start with SMTP (i.e. port 25) but start with the mail submission port 587 only. This way you will do the translations for your local users and you won't have to deal with remote postmasters listing you as a spam site ;-). If you can find an RFC (or any kind of *design* document), which covers IDN in SMTP then please post the reference to the list and I withdraw my objection. ---- end proposal What I learned yesterday is that IDN was first proposed about 1997 (possibly earlier). The RFC 3490, is dated 2003. There is browser support for it in IE7 (but not IE6) and there is support in recent versions of opera and firefox. There is no support in Outlook (according to previous posts on this list). It looks to me as if it has taken 10 years to get browser support and the strategy is to avoid it everywhere else. There is some mumbling about SMTP but I could not find any concrete proposals (but perhaps it is in RFC 3490 -- I did not read it carefully since the abstract indicated that the ascii translations would be used). If you have to support an IDN domain then I would think that the first place to add server support is to do the translations in an apache module so that a 'mailto' link would return the ascii-translated domain name ... but I don't even know if that is practical. -- --gh
