Subject: [EAI] draft of the new charter for EAI WG

From: "YAO Jiankang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:33:08 +0800

Dear all,

     The draft of new charter is proposed below. We can finalize the new charter based on the following text.

    This message is sent with permission from co-chairs.

    any comments are welcome.

Yao Jiankang

-------------------------------------------------------

Description of Working Group:

Since early in the effort to internationalize domain names, which
resulted in the standards associated with IDNA, it has been
understood that internationalization of email address local parts is
required. At the same time, email address internationalization poses
a series of special problems. Constraints on the interpretation of 
local-parts by any system other than the final delivery one make 
address encoding nearly impossible. The need to use addresses in both 
the email envelope and in header fields, and to do so in ways that are 
at least compatible, suggests that this is not a simple and isolated 
problem.

This working group’s previous experimental efforts investigated the
use of UTF-8 as a general approach to email internationalization.
That approach is based on the use of an SMTP extension to enable
both the use of UTF-8 in envelope address local-parts and optionally
in domain-parts and the use of UTF-8 in mail headers -- both in
address contexts and wherever encoded-words are permitted today.
Other protocols were similarly extended.

This working group has finished all of its deliverables under the original charter.

Several of the WG’s experimental RFCs based on UTF8SMTP extension have been proven
during the experimental phase and now need to be moved to standards
track.  Downgrading is a complex issue. This working group will do more research on it, and make a decision about “downgrade with alt-addr / downgrade with no alt-addr / no downgrade”.  The WG may create either standards track or additional experimental or informational RFCs for downgrading related issues.
Additionally there are some other areas which may require more effort to make the smooth operation of internationalized email address.  

Deliverables

The following deliverables are foreseen in this charter. The 

WG chairs may (re)structure the deliverables into specific 

documents or document sets as needed. Adding or removing
documents outside of these deliverables will require a charter

update.

* UTF-8 SMTP extension specification (Standard) 

* Header format specification (Standard)

* UTF-8 POP specification (Standard)

* UTF-8 IMAP specification (Standard)

* Downgrade (Exp or Info)

Going forward, it is possible that the downgrading specification
will go into no-downgrade or simple downgrade due to the difficulty of fully specifying
all necessary behavior.

Additional possible documents suggested:
* Advice for MUA implementors (Info)

*Advice for EAI deployment (info)

* Advice for non-ASCII and ASCII addresses for the same mailbox (Info)

* Mailinglist(info)

* Mailto(info)

Goals and Milestones:

      Mar 2010  Recharter for standards track

      Apr 2010   Headers & DSN (Standards) to IESG

      Apr 2010   SMTP (Standard) to IESG

      May 2010   IMAP & POP3 (Standard) to IESG

      July 2010   Advice for non-ASCII & ASCII addresses (Info) to IESG

      Aug 2010   Downgrade to IESG

      Sep 2010   Advice for MUA implementors (Info) to IESG

      Sep 2010   Advice for EAI deployment (info) to IESG

      Oct 2010   Mailinglist (info) to IESG

Oct 2010   Mailto(info) to IESG

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From: "Charles Lindsey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:24:36 -0000

>     any comments are welcome.

Can we have as an additional item extending EAI to Netnews? That needs to  
be done, and whether it is done by this group of by the USEFOR WG is up  
for discussion (Harald may be able to advise). Essentially, it is just a  
matter of defining an entension to the Newsgroups header (some work on  
this was done earlier on by USEFOR). Everything else in EAI should work  
out of the box, and downgrading would only be required for gateways to  
other media such as email.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131                       
   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: [email-masked]      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5

---

From: Joseph Yee <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:57:00 -0500

1.
LMTP is now standard track (RFC 3848).  We should cover this in EAI as  
well.  It could be RFC by itself (UTF-8 LMTP) or expand the RFC of   
UTF8SMTP extension to cover it.

2.
I think an advise/guideline like for email address (local part) naming  
would help.  Would be nice to have list of restricted characters  
documented, and may include suggestion of some normalization,  
especially on symbol character plus and dot.  This should be an info  
RFC.

best
Joseph

On 26-Jan-10, at 4:33 AM, YAO Jiankang wrote:

> track.  Downgrading is a complex issue. This working group will do  
> more research on it, and make a decision about “downgrade with alt- 
> addr / downgrade with no alt-addr / no downgrade”.  The WG may  
> create either standards track or additional experimental or  
> informational RFCs for downgrading related issues.
> Additionally there are some other areas which may require more  
> effort to make the smooth operation of internationalized email  
> address.
>
>
> Deliverables
>
> _______________________________________________
> IMA mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ima

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:25:06 +0000

Hi Joseph,
Quick comments on one of your points:

Joseph Yee wrote:

> 1.
> LMTP is now standard track (RFC 3848).

Correction: LMTP is still Informational. Only the corresponding WITH 
value in Received header fields is standard track now.

> We should cover this in EAI as  well.  It could be RFC by itself 
> (UTF-8 LMTP) or expand the RFC of   UTF8SMTP extension to cover it.

Despite the correction, I agree with you. Just saying "UTF8SMTP can be 
used with LMTP" should be enough.

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:56:19 +0100

Charles Lindsey wrote:
> Can we have as an additional item extending EAI to Netnews? That needs 
> to be done, and whether it is done by this group of by the USEFOR WG 
> is up for discussion (Harald may be able to advise). Essentially, it 
> is just a matter of defining an entension to the Newsgroups header 
> (some work on this was done earlier on by USEFOR). Everything else in 
> EAI should work out of the box, and downgrading would only be required 
> for gateways to other media such as email.
>
No.

Netnews is out of scope for this group.

Please submit a draft for this as an individual submission once, in your 
opinion, the EAI spec is stable enough to base something on.

                        harald