Mark D, EAI WG colleagues:
I don't really know the intended message or audience of this
"EAI-focused Explainer Video for this UA Day and beyond", so I'm
guessing at suggestions.
But if most of the thread about Dovecot seems to have been at
the level of technical detail. I think it is probably out of
scope for a non-technical "explainer video".
The most important message for an EAI-focused explainer video
is that the EAI Self-Certification Guide provides a way for
email buyers and email vendors to communicate about EAI
support. EAI buyers use the Guide to understand what the
levels, "Silver", "Gold", and "Platinum", mean for satisfying
their EAI needs, and then specify that they want to buy email
products and services with "Silver", "Gold", or "Platinum"
support. EAI vendors use the Guide to certify their products as
"Silver", "Gold", or "Platinum" level, then use the terms
"Silver", "Gold", and "Platinum" in their marketing materials to
communicate EAI support to customers.
Once buyers and sellers are using that common language to
communicate about EAI support, then the technical experts on
each side can wade into the details of whether SMTP AUTHENTICATE is better
than LOGIN and such.
At a high level,
"Silver" level means that the software can correspond with
others who use globally inclusive (EAI) email addresses, but
the organisation's own email addresses are limited Latin only.
"Gold" level means that the organisation's own email addresses
can be globally inclusive, with some configuration or
non-default settings or rough edges, plus all the benefits of
"Silver". "Platinum" gives all the benefits of "Gold", but
using default settings and with no rough edges and with
polish.
Best regards,
—Jim DeLaHunt
On 2025-02-07 02:20, Seda Akbulut via
UA-EAI wrote:
Hello all,
Just wanted to bring Mark’s email on top of
your email box as we are finalizing the video. Last call
for your feedback to the questions Mark raised below.
With thanks for all feedback!
Seda
I am currently finishing the EAI-focusee
Explainer Video for this UA Day and beyond (the
technical class has already been finalized and delivered
to leadership).
In case the EAI community feels that any of the data
that can be generalized from this thread (and adjacent
data) needs to be in that video, I just need to have it
formatted in a way that works for a more general
audience.
e.g..: what are the specific repeating questions that
stop the clients from being certified Gold.
Let me know.
Hi,
I may be confused, by which I mean that I
definitely am confused by hope I’m not TOO confused
about this particular part of the world.
The LOGIN command allows only ASCII
usernames and passwords, but various forms of
AUTHENTICATE allow anything and everything,
independent of UTF8=ACCEPT. I like AUTHENTICATE much
better than LOGIN and see Oauth and/or Passkey as the
way forward for UA. (I have opinions about which is
best, but in truth I’ll be happy if there’s traction
on either. Anything good enough is good enough.)
Arnt
On Tue, 28 Jan
2025, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
Dovecot allows
practically everything even if you don’t enable
UTF8=ACCEPT. From memory there are only two
differences:
1. Dovecot
won’t allow a well-behaved MTA such as Exim or
Postfix to deliver mail with SMTPUTF8. Postfix has
an option to override that, I’m sure there are
other ways as well. I doubt that many people
enable this option, or one of the other ways.
2. If a
message arrives From: blå@xn--gr-zia.org, such as
you might see if the message is from Exchange,
then you may see xn- -gr-zia in the user interface
of a mail reader, and a search for grå may or may
not find the message. If UTF8=ACCEPT is enabled
you should only ever see grå and searching should
work reliably.
That sounds
right. But the bit about ASCII usernames and
passwords is
also true. I
looked at the code which is quite simple.
Dovecot’s
handling of unexpected Unicode is so liberal that
some clients protest 😉
Date: Monday,
27 January 2025 at 18:18
Subject: Re:
[UA-EAI] Re: [Ext] Re: Dovecot 2.4 released today
On Mon, 27 Jan
2025, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
Sorry, I
assumed that John’s question was about IMAP
clients. I agree that there are more UA-ready mail
clients in general, even if I’m a little surprised
by that list. Last time I tested the ios app
(Apple’s, I assume) it was unable to reply
correctly, and since I’m typing this into Outlook,
let’s test… nope, can’t add a Unicode address to
this message, see screenshot. The previous version
could do it, and OWA can too.
When I was
testing EAI software a while ago, I found almost
no IMAP
clients or
servers that had the EAI extensions, but it hardly
mattered
since they
handled EAI messages and UTF-8 folder names using
the regular
non-EAI
methods. Dovecot, at least up to 2.3, only allows
ASCII user
names and
passwords (I looked at the code.) In 2.4 it
should allow them
if your client
turns on the extension. Any idea if it does even
if you
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com,
Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Mark W. Datysgeld from Governance Primer
_______________________________________________
UA-EAI mailing list -- ua-eai@icann.org
To unsubscribe send an email to ua-eai-leave@icann.org
_______________________________________________
By submitting your personal data, you consent to the processing of your personal data for purposes of subscribing to this mailing list accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy (https://www.icann.org/privacy/policy) and the website Terms of Service (https://www.icann.org/privacy/tos). You can visit the Mailman link above to change your membership status or configuration, including unsubscribing, setting digest-style delivery or disabling delivery altogether (e.g., for a vacation), and so on.
--
--Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh@jdlh.com http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, Canada