[Python-Dev] Internationalized email support (was mUTF-7 support?)

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 16:16:24 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> R. David Murray writes:
> 
>  > in the email address (and can't contain non-ASCII yet...we need RFC 6855
>  > support for that, and I'm not sure *anybody* has that yet).
> 
> If it's an RFC, *somebody* has it *somewhere*. :-)

Ah, it looks like you may be right.  I didn't find any hits in the
first few pages on Google; the closest I got was:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/QBFibOEK5x4#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/QBFibOEK5x4

I started writing a response that said "if so, it is hidden from
google".  Then I did some deeper digging, and found this:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-more-global-email.html

So my search using the RFC number was just too narrow...since gmail is
IMAP based, Google itself must have *some* sort of RFC 6855 support.
(Unless they've done a hack job of this internationalization support
that only works for their own gmail clients, which given my past
experience working with the gmail IMAP API I would believe...although
I think the IMAP problems I found were mostly bugs rather than
intentional deviations from the standards).

We had a GSOC student (Milan Oberkirch) working on international email
support this past summer, and I believe you asked in the proposal review
phase why working on support for these RFCs was apropos.  At the time I
was kind of hoping Python could kickstart development of
internationalized email by providing tools to build experiments, but now
that Google has announced support, supporting it has become surprisingly
immediately relevant.  (The previously experimental postfix support for
RFC 6531 is targeted for official release in 2.12, which is another big
step forward.)

I'd better get to reviewing the rest of those patches sometime
soon....they include a preliminary patch for RFC 6855.  Unfortunately
the email package itself doesn't handle RFC 6532 email and there's no
proposed patch for that yet.

--David