Why?
It’s an EAI issue more than anything else.
If your email client or server can’t handle UTF-8 then doing the punycode conversion is unlikely to help
I’d also encourage RIPE NOT to force Latin characters only – the RIPE region covers multiple languages which are not Latin based and if anything it should be leading by example
More details on EAI and UA issues here:
Regards
Michele
--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
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https://www.blacknight.com/
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From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces@ripe.net> on behalf of David Guo via anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net>
Reply to: David Guo <david@xtom.com>
Date: Tuesday 19 November 2019 at 13:34
To: Thomas Hungenberg <th@cert-bund.de>, "anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net" <anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses
Oh you already tried and it works. I suggest RIPE can convert the IDN domains to punnycode on database.
From: David Guo <david@xtom.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 2:32:54 PM
To: Thomas Hungenberg <th@cert-bund.de>; anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net <anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses
Did you try IDN / Punnycode converter?
Try abuse@xn--zrich-kva.email ?
From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces@ripe.net> on behalf of Thomas Hungenberg <th@cert-bund.de>
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 2:27:13 PM
To: anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net <anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net>
Subject: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses
Hi,
some abuse contacts registered with RIPE use non-ascii characters with
the abuse-mailbox addresses, e.g.
% Abuse contact for '195.78.76.0 - 195.78.77.255' is 'abuse@zürich.email'
However, the corresponding MTA does not support SMTPUTF8:
7B579403C6: to=<abuse@zürich.email>,
relay=mail.xn--zrich-kva.email[109.95.241.50]:25, delay=0.33,
delays=0.01/0/0.32/0, dsn=5.6.7, status=bounced (SMTPUTF8 is required, but was
not offered by host mail.xn--zrich-kva.email[109.95.241.50])
(In this particular case, sending email to the IDNA representation of the
email address <abuse@xn--zrich-kva.email> works.)
In our experience, using umlauts and other non-ascii characters in
(the host part of) email addresses still cause a lot of problems in general.
Even if the recipient's MX supports SMTPUTF8 correctly, MTAs on the transport
way may fail to handle SMTPUTF8 messages.
To prevent such problems and make sure all abuse mailboxes can be addressed,
I wonder if the values of abuse-mailbox attributes should be restricted to
ASCII characters only.
What do you think?
- Thomas