Subject: Re: [EAI] Fw: [vip] Email Address Internationalization (EAI) and Gmail

From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2014 13:30:11 +0200

On Friday, June 27, 2014 3:42:29 AM CEST, Jiankang Yao wrote:
> Is it a big news for EAI deployment? 

Gmail is the world's biggest provider, so yes, I think it is.

> Can someone in the list confirm it?

I also read the IMAP list, where someone has posted a couple of comments. 
My impression is that they're serious about it, but not far enough to 
deploy at "the end of this month" as was said in that ICANN meeting. 
Perhaps they're doing an internal-only deployment first.

Arnt

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:45:20 -0400

--On Tuesday, July 01, 2014 13:30 +0200 Arnt Gulbrandsen
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> I also read the IMAP list, where someone has posted a couple
> of comments. My impression is that they're serious about it,
> but not far enough to deploy at "the end of this month" as was
> said in that ICANN meeting. Perhaps they're doing an
> internal-only deployment first.

Yes.  Independent of what Google is doing, I think the
strategies that several of our discussions suggest are either:

* Do everything at once because you are confident of adequate
users and uses and can effectively arrange a multi-vendor flag
day.  Probably this works best for very small mail providers and
for very large ones with language-homogeneous customer bases.
It seems to be more or less the strategy that is being followed
in China, at least as I understand it from Yao's notes over the
last year or so.

* Upgrade the mail store and then the IMAP/POP servers before
doing anything else.   If webmail is supported for access to
those mail stores, upgrade it.  Warn those IMAP and POP users
that, if they receive EAI-style mail and have not upgraded their
MUAs, they won't be able to receive it except via the webmail
interface (if one exists).  If webmail represents a large enough
portion of the user base, implement EAI there and leave POP and
IMAP support (other than "you can't get that message this way"
notifications) for later.  Then upgrade the delivery-side MTA
and maybe the sending-side one so that EAI messages can actually
be accepted (and maybe sent).  Don't support local EAI addresses
initially, so the systems are usable to receive (and maybe send)
mail with non-ASCII addresses that point elsewhere.   If I were
doing it and being maximally careful and conservative, I'd make
sure that receiving was deployed and worked well before I'd
allow sending, even for replies, because the latter requires
that I get externally-visible trace fields and sort out dealing
with rejection messages from legacy hosts to whom I sent (and
supporting questions and complaints about them for my users).
Only after that was really stable would I consider adding local
non-ASCII mailboxes and the OSS and user support efforts they
would imply.

I'm sure there are lots of other plausible scenarios for mail
providers of more than very modest size.  But those are the two
that seem most reasonable to me.  Note that it is consistent
with the "don't downgrade at all, just find a way to notify"
approach to POP and IMAP.   If Google is doing something along
those lines, I we should be thankful that progress is being made
and that none of us should be surprised by the general outline.

best,
    john