On 20 Mar 2019, at 16:01, John R Levine wrote: >>> What do we call mail that's not EAI mail? It's not ASCII mail, since non-EAI messages can contain any character sets you want in the message body. > >> And in the headers, including in the name in the email address... > > No, not really. In non-EAI mail, the headers are all ASCII, even though some of that ASCII may be MIME encodings of UTF-8. On systems that support 8BITMIME (all of them, these days) the body can contain literal unencoded UTF-8 in the body parts, although the MIME headers between the body parts are still ASCII. Ok, I was sloppy in my wording. If the email client do understand MIME and handle that correctly, one can have non-ascii in headers and not only the body already since...hmmm...1991. Thats only 28 years. :-) > In EAI mail, the headers and the body part MIME headers can contain UTF-8 just abuout everywhere other than the field names. Yes, but for me, if you can encode things and then decode in a non-destructive way, I call that support. What EAI is doing is to add the ability to have non-ascii in the email address. YMMV regarding how important that is. Personally I see it as one of the largest mistakes and issues with email that people try to have their name as local part in an email address, as that gives the ability for people to guess email addresses. The structure of an address in an SMTP based email do have a slot for the name of a person, and since 1991 that can contain non-ascii. That said, yes, I know, have talked with many, and understand people that want to have non-ascii in email addresses. Specifically for use in a local context. That should not be mixed with the ability to have ones name in non-ascii in an email header. Patrik
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