Dear John,

Some of the systems integrated well ASCII fallback. However it was with experimental EAI, those newer systems have not created any mess in my tests.

But, even if I want to agree with those who says that if you have EAI why do you need ASCII, it is literally because of that ASCII fallback that seems to be working in some systems a decent job. Otherwise, everyone will abandon EAI and just use ASCII, because EAI doesn't work (every time).

Until we reach critical mass as Arnt said, and that's apparently only possible with ASCII fallback at the moment (because of Unicode in mailbox name, which means changing all email server software everywhere and mail admin software and... - and that's my problem with original RFC), we are busted. And I agree with you, I don't like it either, but I was thinking the other way - I wanted a change in RFC and seems to me, we now got that change (if I read well the change) which allow us to use puny code in mailbox name, and have ASCII on both sides (EAI email with simple ASCII representation on both side of @), which will be delivered for sure... And if I read incorrectly, I apologize.

Regards

Dušan

4. 1. 2025. 18:35, John Levine via UA-EAI <ua-eai@icann.org> је написао/ла:

It appears that Dessalegn Yehuala via UA-EAI <mequanint.yehuala@gmail.com> said:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>My take on EAI adoption and Mailman’s potential role is that, while Mailman
>has made substantive progress in messages and interfaces
>internationalizations, achieving full EAI support remains a significant
>challenge, as evidenced in Mailman 3.10. Managing mailing lists with mixed
>EAI and non-EAI subscribers introduces complexities that extend beyond
>enabling UTF-8 addresses, requiring seamless email delivery across diverse
>environments- a gap not yet fully addressed by current standards. As John
>pointed out, suggestions like ASCII fallback addresses, while practical, ...

I wish people would stop saying this. ASCII fallback addresses are *not* practical. The experimental version of EAI had them and they were a
failure. Mail programs didn't handle them well, and the two addresses kept leaking into the wrong contexts.

And as many people have noted, if everyone has to have an ASCII address anyway why bother with EAI?

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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