RE: mailto URIs

How about the following tack?

Define the syntax for the address part of as 'mailto-addr',
and give the syntax as 'uric*', i.e., a sequence of
(possibly hex-encoded) bytes. 

Then, in the text, note that

(URIC-encoded) 'addr-spec' is reliable
(URIC-encoded) 'mailbox-list' MAY be used, but is often
   badly implemented

Then note that if future email standards allow UTF-8
in some future version of RFC 2822, that the 'mailto-addr'
could be used with (URIC-encoded) utf-8-addr-spec.

> Imagine the URL quoting problems to properly do 'mailbox'.
> Really. I simply can't imagine that many people would do it correctly,
> even after a few tries.


URIC encoding is a simple algorithm, really. It might not
be easy to do manually, but it's pretty simple to implement
taking a full "mailbox-list" and URIC-encoding any reserved
characters within it. And the reverse -- mapping from a URIC-encoded
mailto: address to the "to:" line of an email message -- also
seems pretty straightforward.

> And I can imagine that they could do it very 
> insecurely if we expand the definition.

What do you mean by 'insecurely'?

Received on Monday, 20 June 2005 17:24:22 UTC