Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

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Should Hmailserver support SMTPUTF8 and other similar relating to Address Internationalization?

Yes
11
92%
No
1
8%
 
Total votes: 12

PMZ7036
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Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by PMZ7036 » 2017-08-18 18:22

This mainly comes from the thread in the General Discussion, but as far as I know, there hasn't been a feature request yet.

Basically, we would like hMailServer to implement SMTPUTF8, which would allow UTF-8 encoding in mailbox names and header fields. This would allow email addresses like günter@büncher.berlin and ไทย@ua-test.link, basically allowing non ascii characters in the mailbox name, and has been standardized with RFC 6530, RFC 6531, RFC 6532, and RFC 6533. I did a little research and found out about the Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which has resources and documents to help with the implementation.

SendMail, Postfix and Exim already supports SMTPUTF8 and Gmail and Outlook 2016 can send to and receive from internationlized address. SMTPUTF8 support in hMailServer would give it the edge. This is becoming more and more necessary and no longer a luxury as the linked thread shows that these internationalized email addresses are becoming used more and more and hMailServer can't send emails to these addresses, forcing users of hMailServer to use an alternative method to send emails to those addresses.

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mattg
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by mattg » 2017-08-19 04:18

PMZ7036 wrote:... basically allowing non ascii characters in the mailbox name, and has been standardized with RFC 6530, RFC 6531, RFC 6532, and RFC 6533. I did a little research and found out about the Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which has resources and documents to help with the implementation.
All of those RFC are currently still 'Proposed Standards'.

Hmailserver doesn't normally support RFCs until they are ratified.

Also, would you like to nominate a question that we can vote for a poll please. I'll add the question to this thread.
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by PMZ7036 » 2017-08-24 22:39

mattg wrote: All of those RFC are currently still 'Proposed Standards'.

Hmailserver doesn't normally support RFCs until they are ratified.
I'm pretty sure these RFC are indeed ratified. A "Proposed Standard" means that the specification is stable and that implementations can be deployed in the Internet. Actual practice has been that full progression through the sequence of standards levels is typically quite rare, and most popular IETF protocols remain at Proposed Standard. For instance, most of the RFCs for SSH are "Proposed Standards" (i.e. RFC 4251). So yes, Hmailserver should support these as it has finished the standardization process.
mattg wrote: Also, would you like to nominate a question that we can vote for a poll please. I'll add the question to this thread.
Maybe something like "Should Hmailserver support SMTPUTF8 and other standards relating to Email Address Internationalization?"

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mattg
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by mattg » 2017-08-24 23:54

Had to keep it under 100 characters - hope that is OK.
I can change the answer options too if you like
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by PMZ7036 » 2017-08-25 18:48

mattg wrote:Had to keep it under 100 characters - hope that is OK.
I can change the answer options too if you like
Just simple "Yes" and "No" options would be appreciated as it is an RFC and ratified as mentioned in my previous post.

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mattg
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by mattg » 2017-08-25 22:30

Sure

At the end of the day, Martin has ALWAYS stated that he won't include draft standards, and he hasn't to date.
This would need a lot of votes to get to the top of this list >> https://www.hmailserver.com/feature_voting_extended
And unfortunately we haven't had much regular development for a few years. We get bug fixes and OpenSSL updates, and sparodic at best new development. There is a 64 bit version that has been in alpha for over a year
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SchultzITsolutions
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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by SchultzITsolutions » 2018-10-17 15:31

The underlying issue is getting increasingly popular/required, but I know the RFCs are still in status "proposed standard". Probably as this is not much of an issue for american users (as opposed to everybody else non-english native-speaking) I am afraid this topic does not pick up enough US attention. So we probably will have to wait for this to become reality for quite some time...

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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by xnetdude » 2019-10-30 21:12

Does anyone know if there is any progress or update on this, can't find anything so not hopeful.

Thanks.

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Re: Email Address Internationalization (EAI)

Post by mattg » 2019-10-31 00:46

Still all 'Proposed standards', and still no work done towards this in hMailserver
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