>PW> It is such a big problem that we should not even mention it in
>PW> the document?

Yes, it is.  You have no idea.

The stuff in section 3 of the openpgpkey draft is trying to
canonicalize mailbox names, i.e., given some mailbox name, find the
"real" mailbox name that it corresponds to.  This is an extremely
difficult problem that people have been scratching their heads about
literally for decades with no success.  With the advent of EAI,
mailboxes can be arbitrary UTF-8 rather than ASCII, which makes the
already intractable problem of what's equivalent to what much harder.
For example, folding upper and lower case in ASCII is easy, while in
EAI it pretty much impossible for a variety of reasons.  One new
problem (not the hardest) is that the case folding rules are language
specific -- the way you fold accented characters in Turkish is
different from the way you do it in French, and it's even different
between European French and Canadian French.  You cannot tell by
looking at a mailbox name what language it is.

Unless you are vastly smarter than everyone else who has looked at
this problem, you're not going to solve it any time soon.  Every
approach suggested so far is something we're aware of and is known not
to work when applied to the complex mess that is Internet e-mail.  If
you want to use hashes to represent mailbox names, you either have to
completely punt on variant names, which the users will hate, or stop
here, talk to people who understand the subtle reality of mail and see
if there's any way to come up with something that works.

As I've said before, if you try to advance a draft with language
anything like what's in section 3.1, it will be shot down in IETF last
call and again in the IESG, neither time by me.

I realize this isn't what you want to hear, but you've dived into a
swamp.  You may not recognize it as a swamp, but trust me, that's
where you are.

R's,
John

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