[ietf-dkim] EAI and 8bit downgrades

[John R. Levine]

> Specify MUST, but clarify that this is just for now and may be revisited
> at a later time -- for example, if the SMTP protcol design community ever
> backs down and accepts DJB's approach to the 8-bit message problem
> (<http://cr.yp.to/smtp/8bitmime.html>, essentially that it is OK to break
> any remaining 7-bit enforcing servers).  They probably won't ever, but
> just in case...

If you were following the EAI work, you'd know that they probably will do 
that within the next couple of months, albeit with an SMTP flag so servers 
and clients can tell whether a hop is 8-bit UTF or legacy.  They 
specifically do NOT provide any downgrade mechanism -- if a path isn't EAI 
from end to end, the message can't be delivered.  (Please read the many 
years of archives of the EAI list, in which they tried every imaginable 
approach via many experimental RFCs and a lot of running code, before 
commenting on the wisdom of this approach.)

I beseech this group to refrain from hypothetiecal guesses about what some 
of us might think would be a good idea to address some anticipated 
problem, even though nobody has tried it. It was a mistake in the mailing 
list so-called BCP, and it would be a mistake here.

There will be DKIM signatures on EAI messages.  It is pretty obvious how 
to do it, and in the few corners where it's not obvious, we won't know the 
right answer any better than anyone else until we've tried it and seen 
what happens.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly