The IESG has approved the following document: - 'IMAP Support for UTF-8' (draft-ietf-eai-5738bis-12.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Email Address Internationalization Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-eai-5738bis/ [Please note: This document is one a set of four interdependent documents: draft-ietf-eai-5738bis draft-ietf-eai-popimap-downgrade draft-ietf-eai-rfc5721bis draft-ietf-eai-simpledowngrade These documents should be reviewed, evaluated, and understood together.] Technical Summary These four EAI documents make up a set that are interdependent and should be reviewed, evaluated, and understood together. Their abstracts have been examined and verified to sufficiency to describe the individual documents. The abstract for this particular document reads: This specification extends the Internet Message Access Protocol version 4rev1 (IMAP4rev1) to support UTF-8 encoded international characters in user names, mail addresses and message headers. This specification replaces RFC 5738. Working Group Summary No particular process issues of note. The WG had extensive and constructive discussions about the role of "downgrading" (e.g., converting a message stored on the server that contains non-ASCII header or envelope information) in the transition to an all-i18n environment. Some of those issues and tradeoffs are discussed in draft-ietf-eai-popimap-downgrade and draft-ietf-eai-simpledowngrade. In some cases, the best strategy may be to "hide" those messages that cannot be delivered without change to legacy clients either with or without some attempt at an error message. A complete treatment of those options is impossible because the optimal strategies will depend considerably on local circumstances. Consequently the base IMAP and POP3 documents are no longer dependent on particular downgrading choices and that two methods presented are, to a considerable extent, just examples. They are recommended as alternative Standards Track documents because they are protocol specifications and their sometimes-subtle details have have been carefully worked out, even though the WG has no general recommendation to make between them (or other strategies). While opinions differ in the WG about which downgrading mechanisms are likely to see the most use, if any, consensus is strong that these four documents represent the correct output. Document Quality Some development and interoperability testing has occurred and is progressing. There are strong commitments in various countries to implement and deploy the EAI (more properly, SMTPUTF8) messages and functions specified in RFCs 6530 through 6533. Those messages will be inaccessible to many users without POP3 and IMAP support, so these specifications are quite likely to be implemented and deployed in a timely fashion. Reviewers who made particular contributions prior to IETF Last Call are acknowledged in the documents. See Section 3 for additional information. Personnel Document Shepherd: John C Klensin Responsible Area Director: Pete Resnick Note that Pete Resnick is listed as a co-author on this document as a result of contributions well before he became AD (and primarily to its the Experimental predecessor. He has not been actively involved in an author or editor role since joining the IESG. RFC Editor Notes (late addition; sorry, IESG Secretary) The document contains the pre-5378 disclaimer, but that isn't necessary; please remove it. Also, please add an informative reference to RFC 5530, and add a citation to it in Section 6: OLD A server that advertises "UTF8=ONLY" will reject with a "NO [CANNOT]" response any command that might require UTF-8 support and is not preceded by an "ENABLE UTF8=ACCEPT" command. NEW A server that advertises "UTF8=ONLY" will reject with a "NO [CANNOT]" response [RFC5530] any command that might require UTF-8 support and is not preceded by an "ENABLE UTF8=ACCEPT" command.
