In message <DBB71EC8-7564-4AAB-B490-5A894B39AF72@ripe.net>, Edward Shryane <eshryane@ripe.net> wrote:
What I found was *not* an internationalized domain name, per se. Well, maybe it was/is and maybe it wasn't/isn't. I'll let you all decide, and then you can tell me if I have used improper terminology to descrtbe what I found.
The email address you found, is the only IDN (i.e. non-ASCII) email address in the RIPE database (so far).
What I found is definitely *not* "US-ASCII" i.e. 7-but ASCII. It is a separate question as to whether or not what I found qualifies, properly, under the relevant RFCs, as being a proper sort of a representation of an "IDN". (I suspect it does not.) The relevant current RFCs appear to be RFC5890 and possibly RFC5891, RFC5892, and RFC5894, but I'm sorry to say that each of these is rather complex, and I do not have time available right now to dredge into them and learn the real current rules. All I can say is that a brief glance at these RFCs seems to indicate that RFC5892 is the most directly relevant, and that RFC5892 appears to say that Unicode must be used for representation of IDNs. The domain name I found *is* ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) but does not appear to me to be Unicode.
It's currently considered a valid value in the RIPE database, as it's composed of Latin-1 characters, and the attribute syntax check passes.
Yes.
There is also an MX record for the domain (although the host dc-eb0309b6496a.xn--zrich-kva.email is currently unreachable for me).
However, it may cause inter-operability issues, as the sending mail server needs to handle IDN addresses correctly.
Yes.
DB-WG: should we allow non-ASCII addresses in the RIPE database?
More precisely, the question should be, I think: (a) Should charcters that are non-US-ASCII be allowed in the data base generally, and separately (b) how should IDNs be represented in the data base?
DB-WG: is punycode for domain names a viable alternative for encoding non-ASCII email addresses?
I think that in order to be comprehensive, domain names appearing in the data base *must* be encoded *either* as punycode *or* else as UTF-8. I don't believe that ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) will be able to do the job entirely, but the other two options will.
For example, the punycode equivalent abuse@xn--zrich-kva.email is already a valid value for the e-mail (or abuse-c) attribute.
Yes, and the same can be said generally. i.e. the (punycoded) domain name xn--zrich-kva.email is in all respects a substitute for its Unicode equivalent. Thus, xn--zrich-kva.email may be used, for example, as the argument to the "dig" command, and/or in all other contexts where a fully qualified domain name may be used. Regards, rfg