Re: Are international characters allowed in email addresses?

> > and you've been in the IDN discussion so you should also be familiar
> > with those issues.
> 
> The IDN discussion has produced a requirements memo that states, inter
> alia, that

the IDN requirements memo is irrelevant.  the discussions on the IDN 
list have repeatedly focused on the problems of names in multiple
character sets, translation of those names to a common format, 
canonicalization of those names, encoding of those names in ASCII to 
make them safe for existing applications, comparison of those names,
etc.  the notion that an application that actually uses domain names
as protocol elements can be fixed by simply making it 8bit clean has 
been soundly and repeatedly refuted.

the issues for email addresses are not identical, but are quite similar.
I'm sure they will be revisited in due time by applications area groups, 
but that time is after the IDN group has finished its work.
we'll have to have those discussions then anyway, just to bring everybody
up to speed.  so there's no sense in our having them now.  folks who
are interested are welcome to read the IDN list archives or join that
discussion.

Keith