Non-ASCII in email address ?

I'm monitoring Struts (JSP/Servlet based application development
framework) development mailing list and this bug report
cauthg my eyes:
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29787

Here, the submitter claims that email address whose user
portion (user@domain) contains a letter u with diaeresis
(U+00fc) should be allowed by the Struts validator component.
The submitter reasons that since IDN allows non-ASCII
in the domain name, non-ASCII should be allowed in email
address as well.

This reasoning sounds logical but I haven't heard about
a discussion legalizing non-ASCII character in the
email addresses.  Am I right to assume that
email addresses must be all in ASCII ? (By email address,
I mean user@domain, not the real names put inside () after
user@domain, or outside of <user@domain> which are allowed
to have non-ASCII by MIME for long time).

-- 
KUROSAKA ("Kuro") Teruhiko
San Francisco, California, USA
http://www.bhlab.com/

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 12:46:23 UTC