Thanks Joshua... <div><br></div><div>I agree, GSoC sounded ambitious due to deadline and possibly larger than scope and time available in GSoC. At least for this year.</div><div><br></div><div>I think your list was helpful, and i authentically suspect that within that list there are a few what I call "Russian Doll" (open, new doll inside. Open, discover new doll inside that one, repeat.) issues, dependencies, etc. that will likely need attention.</div><div><br></div><div>As far as abstracts that help describe the topic... I have some URLs that describe the IDN & EAI a bit better that are written up by John Levine.</div><div><div><font><span style="background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0)"><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18n.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18n.html</a><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18n2.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18n2.html</a><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18n3.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18n3.html</a><br><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai.html</a><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai2.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai2.html</a><br><a href="http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai3.html" target="_blank">http://jl.ly/Email/i18neai3.html</a><br></span></font></div><div><br></div><div>With respect to growing my understanding to where I could have conversations with potential patrons about supporting the effort to bring Thunderbird these functions, I would need to find out timing, costs, and scope. </div><div><br></div><div>Also, I am not clear on how such "sponsors" could lend their support to TB for this (ie Would they have to hire some of the volunteers on contract to donate to them directly, fund through Mozilla, etc.) </div><div><br></div><div>We have an opportunity to potentially have the effort get a patron or two - but the conversation to have with folks who are outside the "Mozillasphere" and are commercial players will require real pragmatic project details (how much, what does it get, how long before it starts, how long will it take them, etc).</div><div><br></div><div> I need to understand these things, and/or if this is too ambitious or can't be reasonably accomplished.</div><div><br></div><div>-jothan</div><br>On Thursday, February 19, 2015, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 <<a href="mailto:pidgeot18@gmail.com">pidgeot18@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div>On 2/19/2015 1:46 PM, Jothan Frakes
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Hi-
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I am a fellow volunteer on a separate project (the Public
Suffix List) within the Mozilla community for quite a while,
and I have been a member of the ICANN community since ICANN
formed (and before).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Anyway, pardon this ask, as I am unfamiliar with the
Thunderbird development realm.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I am writing about IDN and EAI support being added to
Thunderbird, across all supported platforms.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Some context and background on IDN (Pardon this if you're
familiar):</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
I am personally familiar enough to have produced a rant on thus
subject, although the same is not true of everybody on the list :-)<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">There are some really interesting circumstances
that can occur with EIA where a right to left language like
Hebrew or Arabic might be on the left hand of the @ with a left
to right language TLD (Or Vice-Versa) which can reverse the
display of the address and be potentially confusing.</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
And case insensitivity, Unicode normalization, and things like C1
controls. Oh, and the IDNA2003/IDNA2008 charlie foxtrot.<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>CUTTING TO THE CHASE...<br>
<b>Not knowing decorum here, I'll just throw this out
there.... Could I get an idea around a] IF these
enhancements are possible / probable, and b] if yes, what
perhaps costs are on this? I may be able to locate a patron
for this effort / find / fund sourcing for accomplishing
them.</b></div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
I've thought about EAI and IDN in the past (I can't find the post
right now). At present, we can send to an IDN email address, but
that's about the limit of our support--the core code chokes on IDN
(even if you use A-labels--some core Gecko code "helpfully"
normalized that back into the U-label and screwed up the match).<br>
<br>
The rough work list of what needs to be done:<br>
1. Add support to use EAI/IDN addresses when composing messages, and
handle appropriate downgrading when necessary [I'm already rewriting
the MIME message building portion of the backend, and I'm definitely
planning on making sure this gets addressed].<br>
2. Add proper validation support for EAI/IDN addresses, and permit
their use in appropriate places in the UI.<br>
3. Ensure that we normalize addresses to the proper format for,
e.g., database comparisons or searching.<br>
4. Handle the IMAP and POP requests to enable EAI properly.<br>
5. Support using an EAI/IDN email address as an account.<br>
6. Miscellaneous other places where we need to support email
addresses (e.g., S/MIME certificate matching).<br>
<br>
The main problem of doing this work is first, one needs time to get
all of this done, and, second, the major open-source implementations
(e.g., postfix, cyrus) haven't implemented necessary protocol
support yet, so I can't test real-world usage scenarios for EAI.
(IDN is fairly simple test via use of VMs and DNS).<br>
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Also, I notice there is a day left in before Summer of Code
deadline, but I suspect this request might be larger than a
single line item (or two). Is that an appropriate place or is
this too late to reasonably accomplish this?</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
I'm not sure this is a good match for a GSoC project. The parts that
don't rely on protocol support boil down to a few weeks or a month
of hunting down issues in the UI and fixing them--not enough to fill
out the summer. Protocol support requires having access to test
servers which are not easy to find or set up locally. Nevertheless,
I would be happy to help someone else work on this topic outside of
GSoC if they were available, or maybe even through GSoC if
EAI-compliant IMAP and SMTP servers were available to a student.<br>
<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Joshua Cranmer
Thunderbird and DXR developer
Source code archæologist</pre>
</div>
</blockquote></div><br><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><br>Jothan Frakes<br>Tel: +1.206-355-0230<br><br></div><br>