Hello Ronald, DB-WG,
On 6 Nov 2019, at 23:46, Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
In message <20191106210554.GB5460@hydra.ck.polsl.pl>, Piotr Strzyzewski <Piotr.Strzyzewski@polsl.pl> wrote:
I do not object having properly coded non-ASCII email addresses in the database.
First, just to be clear, we are really only discussing the representation of domain names within the data base. Of course, any email address contains one of those, but we are specifically -not- discussing the representation of the user-ID portion of any email address in the data base.
Understood. The user-ID (local) portion of an email address is not affected, only the domain.
Second, it is nice that you are OK with "properly coded non-ASCII" domain names in the data base. So I am I. That's not the question. The question is how should IDNs be -represented- within the data base.
As I have stated, it is my opinion that the only two viable options at the present time are either (a) punycode or else (b) UTF-8.
DB-WG: - if (a), should the RIPE database automatically convert IDN domain names in email addresses into punycode? - or if (b), should the RIPE database support UTF-8 for the domain part of IDN email addresses? This is technically possible in the Whois server side, but it's a large change for clients.
ISO-8859-1 is not, as far as I know, a standardized or appropriate way of encoding IDNs in any context. If I am wrong about that, then please do correct me an please do point me at the RFC which states otherwise.
Using ISO-8859-1 to encode IDN email addresses in the RIPE database does cause some issues: - Only a small subset of the UTF-8 character set is supported, characters outside ISO-8859-1 are substituted with a '?' on Whois update. - ISO-8859-1 encoded email addresses may not be handled properly by Whois clients or mail servers.
Regards, rfg
Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC