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, conflict with EAI’s goal of native non-ASCII support and risk suboptimal user experiences, as observed in early EAI trials. Promising alternatives, such as EAI-exclusive lists or validating EAI-readiness at registration, depend on broader ecosystem support, including reliable SMTPUTF8 adoption, highlighting the need for stronger industry-wide progress to reach critical mass.

Regards,
Dessalegn

On Fri, Jan 3, 2025 at 9:35 PM John Levine via UA-EAI <ua-eai@icann.org> wrote:
It appears that Arnt Gulbrandsen via UA-EAI <arnt.gulbrandsen@icann.org> said:
>Hi,
>
>3.10 still doesn't include EAI support. I think the only reason is that the changes involved are rather large. If I were the Mailman
>maintainers I'd plan an uninterrupted week to review and merge that, and that's a big chunk of time for a spare-time project like Mailman.

I think the reason is that there is no way to have a mailing list with both EAI and ASCII
subscribers because there's no way to downgrade an EAI message and allow ASCII users
to reply.

We've been thinking about this for a decade and nothing has worked.

I suppose you could add EAI-only lists where you could only subscribe from
a system with SMTPUTF8 support but that doesn't seem very appealing.

R's,
John
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