Re: [EAI] The value of simplified downgrade

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>]

I wasn't very clear, stuck on my cell phone, sorry.

I mean that if a user is trying to send To: and EAI address, and has an EAI aware client, it'd be nice if it could "downgrade" before it got to the server on the sending side.  Then, even though the sender's mail server isn't an EAI server, they could still have a rich EAI experience.  For example, the sender could be me in a US company that doesn't see a need for EAI mailboxes sending mail to a Japanese EAI address.

I think that to be "complete" downgrade would need to consider that kind of scenario (downgrade from sender client before reaching sender server).  That necessitates some sort of automatic mechanism for downgrade, since the sender may not have the ASCII address.  So either algorithmic, or perhaps contacting the server hosting the EAI address.  Due to port blocking, firewalls and proxies and all that, I'm skeptical that the information could be requested reliably from the host server.

-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: SM [mailto:sm at resistor.net] 
Sent: Thursday, September 10,  2009 13:23
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: ima at ietf.org
Subject: RE: [EAI] The value of simplified downgrade

At 11:16 10-09-2009, Shawn Steele wrote:
>So you aren't suggesting an eai aware client should be able to 
>downgradw w/o an eai aware server on it's side?  That is 
>unnecessarily restrictive.

No, my comment was about not having a MUA interact with the SMTP 
server at the receiving end.

I'll comment further in my reply to Ernie's message.

Regards,
-sm