Subject: [EAI] Why the transition will be pretty fast in some places.

From: Shawn Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:45:56 +0000

Right now email addresses in non-English speaking countries is amazingly lame.  For many users it's me picking an arabic address: meaningless.  Or maybe like getting a phone #, it's something to remember but has no intrinsic meaning.

So: IMO, in many countries there will be strong demand to get an EAI address, even if just for their home account.  Once any of the webmail hosts pick up EAI, how acceptable will it be for companies to have legacy mail?  They aren't going to want to miss mails from customers.  Any new mail system in those countries will have EAI as a procurement requirement.  So I expect non-US customers to have fully compliant systems very quickly (couple of years).

Of course the US will still be in the dark ages since they won't have as big of an incentive, and I understand that ____ probably has some mail batch account for his printer that he can still send HELO (not EHLO) mail to and won't upgrade in forever.  (The tubes have blown a few times, and replacements are getting more difficult to find, but he has a cache of spares.)  ;-)

Which is way different than IDN adoption rates, but IDN isn't the same target market.

-Shawn

 
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:21:37 -0500

--On Friday, January 21, 2011 18:45 +0000 Shawn Steele
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Right now email addresses in non-English speaking countries is
> amazingly lame.  For many users it's me picking an arabic
> address: meaningless.  Or maybe like getting a phone #, it's
> something to remember but has no intrinsic meaning.
>
> So: IMO, in many countries there will be strong demand to get
> an EAI address, even if just for their home account.  Once any
> of the webmail hosts pick up EAI, how acceptable will it be
> for companies to have legacy mail?  They aren't going to want
> to miss mails from customers.  Any new mail system in those
> countries will have EAI as a procurement requirement.  So I
> expect non-US customers to have fully compliant systems very
> quickly (couple of years).
> 
> Of course the US will still be in the dark ages since they
> won't have as big of an incentive, and I understand that ____
> probably has some mail batch account for his printer that he
> can still send HELO (not EHLO) mail to and won't upgrade in
> forever.  (The tubes have blown a few times, and replacements
> are getting more difficult to find, but he has a cache of
> spares.)  ;-)
>  

Shawn,

At some level, this is pretty obvious.  It even influenced some
of our early design decisions to keep things simple so that
implementation wasn't a big barrier.   I would disagree only
slightly with you about scope -- for Latin-based writing systems
that require more than the ASCII subset, how important the
additional characters are is a matter of the particular language
and local culture and conventions: I'm very reluctant to assume
that the US will be the only slow-adopter (and there will be
folks in the US who absolutely insist on their right to use
hearts and daggers in their user names).

But that doesn't change things very much:

-- We still need to design for a transition process, even if we
have reason to believe it will be globally short (and especially
short within particular communities).

-- Folks who need to communicate between very different
linguistic and writing system communities are likely to need to
use ASCII for a long, long, time.  Rows of little question marks
are not useful as addresses (and that isn't all of the problem).

-- Our track record in predicting speed of deployment is
terrible.  There are some reasons for that, some of which
interact with the MUA issues that I and others have discussed.
ASCII addresses for folks who don't use Latin-based characters
are terrible, but many generations of people have learned to use
addresses with no obvious linguistic meaning (e.g., I was happy
to stop having to receive mail at something like M3418, but I
lived with it for quite a while) and lots of people are now
"used to" the meaningless strings.  Faced with needing to change
established addresses and/or to replace hardware to get a new
MUA working... well, experience tells me to not predict how
people will behave and then make engineering decisions on that
basis.

     john