Discussion on rules-for-valid-email-addresses

[Brian Ellin]

Here's a comprehensive list of TLDs provided by the IANA:

http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

[David Fuelling]

Cool  I've updated my rules page here: http://groups.google.com/group/eaut/web/rules-for-valid-email-addresses

david

[=peterd]

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt (section 3.4.1) provides a clear
ABNF for addr-spec

Also, we should ensure Punycode (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode) is supported, as TLD
operators are beginning to support this for Internationalized Domain
Names (IDN)

[David Fuelling]

This is interesting -- while punycode would seem to allow IDN-based email addresses, it would seem that these addresses would be VERY user-unfriendly (i.e., hard to read and use).  So, it seems like the adoption of IDN email addresses is unlikely, at least for now -- until some mechanism gets created to support some kind of user-friendly IDN to RFC2822 email address conversion.  Does anything like this exist yet?

[Peter Davis]

well, i know the .biz (to which i am affiliated), and .org both
support punycode today... i am unsure how much use it sees, FWIW.
Wikipedia implies pretty broad support, esp. wrt ccTLDs [2]

punycode only applies to the domain portion of the production.

the EAI working group [1] at IETF is addressing more the user-part of
the production. work remains to be done there.

=peterd

[1] http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/eai-charter.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

[Wil Tan]

> This is interesting -- while punycode would seem to allow IDN-based email
> addresses, it would seem that these addresses would be VERY user-unfriendly
> (i.e., hard to read and use).  So, it seems like the adoption of IDN email
> addresses is unlikely, at least for now -- until some mechanism gets created
> to support some kind of user-friendly IDN to RFC2822 email address
> conversion.  Does anything like this exist yet?

Yes, EAI (http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/eai-charter.html) - I
believe the work is almost done. It requires support from various
components of the email architecture (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, MUA) in order
for it to work though.

[David Fuelling]

I Just updated the following page because single-letter, second-level
domains are apparently valid now (at least, x.org resolves).

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/eaut/web/rules-for-valid-email-addresses
- or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't
work.