by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/10/12 07:11 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/10/12/10359120.aspx
Previous blogs in this series:
I'm going to revisit the topic I covered in part 6 way back in July of last year.
EAI.
Email Address Internationalization.
It's something that I think is really important.
And at some point, China Or Russia or Israel is going to insist that everyone who wants to sell software to them has such support,.
Not yet, mind you -- right now their own infrastructure doesn't support it.
But one day....
For now IDN support in our newest products is there, in great ways.
But LiveID (or whatever they will call it eventually) doesn't support it. So there's a half day to 2-day work item to remove that bogus validation, for 70 different Windows services.
They all support Unicode, but they validate it to limit to the ASCII range usage
Then there are a few pieces that have a lot of work.
Like MAPI.
And SMTP.
And POP3.
And Exchange.
And Outlook integrated with Exchange.
And non-integrated Outlook.
And Windows mail.
And so on, and so on....
Hundreds of features spread across more teams and groups and divisions and business units than any one person (other than perhaps BillG himself has ever had full dominion over.
Now if you know about these various areas, then you know that some of them have done the work and can turn it on in 15 minutes.
Others can get it done in a few weeks.
Still others have milestones of work to do.
Just about every company I know of is in the same boat. And no one wants to move too quickly lest the eventual user experience isn't good trying to use the features across the company (and the companies!)is bad. Especially if they are gong to blame us! :-)
But we have to try to start moving forward, I think.
I'm going to start with EAI and all of the related standards -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Should be worth a few good blogs!
And we'll go from there....
Joshua on 23 Oct 2012 10:22 AM:
I'm willing to bet that upgrading IMAP to UTF-8 email addresses is safe even without a standard because IMAP is already 8 bit clean. POP3 is obsolete anyway.
John Cowan on 29 Oct 2012 11:41 AM:
POP3 is far from obsolete: it puts far less demand on the server than IMAP does.
referenced by
2013/10/17 There's no "I" in IDN, part 19: There's no "I" in IPv6, either!
2013/10/08 There's no "I" in IDN, part 18: There isn't even an "I" in John C. Klensin's name!
2013/09/13 There's no "I" in IDN, part 17: EAI made it to China, and everybody knows it!
2013/04/19 There's no "I" in IDN, part 16: It's a good thing they decided to call it EAI!