Re: [EAI] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-eai-imap-utf8-07

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>]

Alexey Melnikov skrev:
> Black_David at emc.com wrote:
>
> > Alexey,
> >  
> Hi David,
>
> > > > - The recommendation to support MIME header upconversion for
> > > >     "Other widely deployed MIME charsets" strikes me as
> > > >     too vague to be useful guidance to implementers.  
> > ...
> >  
> >
> > > I believe John Klensin has adequately responded to this point.
> > >   
> > John has thoroughly demolished the change I suggested, but I
> > don't think that demolition resolves this concern, as the original
> > text remains vague.
> >
> > OTOH, this draft is intended to be an Experimental RFC - would
> > it be reasonable to say that determining which charsets should
> > be upconverted is part of the experiment?
> I am quite skeptical that we can come to a consensus after running 
> such experiment. The answer to the question is going to be very 
> region/country specific.
> This is not the first time we are discussing the rathole (the same 
> applies to MIME, IMAP SEARCH, IMAP CONVERT extension) and this looks 
> like a big rathole to me.
>
> I think you mentioned earlier that maybe an implementation should 
> support conversion to UTF-8 of all charsets it already supports in 
> SEARCH. After thinking more about this I think this proposal is quite 
> sensible.
It makes quite a lot of sense to me that if an IMAP server supports a 
specific charset in some other context (such as IMAP SEARCH and 
friends), it should be consistent about supporting the same charset in 
UTF8 too.

Inconsistency here would be unreasonable for the user - and by pointing 
to that, we have "reduced to a previously unsolved problem".

Suggested language:

If the server supports other charsets in IMAP SEARCH or IMAP CONVERT 
(add references to taste), it SHOULD also support those charsets in this 
conversion.


             Harald