Am 04.01.2012 02:24, schrieb Phil Pennock:
You have to use  xn--caf-dma.co.za in your backend .. nothing else will
work.

I have never used it, but doesn't setting allow_utf8_domains and
adjusting dns_check_names_pattern do the job?
It depends upon the client software; the official IETF approach is to
use Punycode, but another approach is to just put UTF-8 straight into
DNS -- the argument (which I agree with) is that those who want to work
with that part of the world which needs this will upgrade DNS and those
who don't won't, and it's a lot less work to support UTF-8 than to
support Punycode translations everywhere.
I personally only would let the DAN's-workinggroup* work on DNS, they know what they do most of the time.

You don't need to put punycode everywhere to work with it, thats the brilliance of it. If you have your most loved mailclient , which is not aware of utf8 , use the punycode version of your desired domainname and it still works. It is uncomfortable that way, but hey it works without any additional problem on the levels below or with any other software around.
It even works in Japan :)

I personally run with those two settings, but to my knowledge I've never
sent or received mail which depended upon them.  One of the TODO items
on my plate is Punycode support in Exim, to better play with the IETF
vision of how complex the world should be.

I haven't yet had time to do so.


If I may,

UTF-8 breaks DNS in so many ways on so many different levels it's not worth thinking about. The IETF's approach to the problem is gigantic on the inside, but very simple on the outside and it works with everyone, everywhere and even back in time. I made the first port for the Amiga, and that's an old system, without vendor support or whatever. If It's possible there, any japanese engenieer should be able to port it to modern systems and software instead of making his own dirty solution to the problem.

The ideal implementation results in two simple to use functions like the Java 1.6 implementation does. You just cover all input/output domainnames with one of those functions for encoding_to and decoding_from idn and that's it. Those functions even check if they need to do something at all ;) . I upgraded an entire ISP webapp/dns/daemonconfs etc.etc in less then 10 minutes. With a good choice for your toolkit, you will ask yourself why you waited so long :)

What makes me wonder is, why Exim should get into this mess at all. It's a MTA and as one it's not involved in the process of converting / displaying or encoding domainnames, that's the job of the mailclient. I loved Exim for being the most RFC guided MTA and now i read it's operating in sendmail style ;)

best regards,
   Marius

*) Dan Bernstein and Dan Kaminski :)

IDN Example:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/net/IDN.html

import java.net.IDN;

public class test {
        static public void main(String[]  args) {
                System.out.println( IDN.toUnicode("xn--sf-bcher-95a.de") );
                System.out.println( IDN.toASCII("sf-bücher.de") );
        }
}







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