Hello Ronald, DB-WG,
On 6 Nov 2019, at 00:13, Ronald F. Guilmette via db-wg <db-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
I have found at least one specific case where an IDN does appear in the data base as a UTF-8 encoded string, but since I had never seen that before, I just wanted to know if that was an anomalous mistake or if it was consider normal, acceptable, and routine.
Mea culpa! I misspoke.
Thanks for clarifying!
What I found was *not* an internationalized domain name, per se. Well, maybe it was/is and maybe it wasn't/isn't. I'll let you all decide, and then you can tell me if I have used improper terminology to descrtbe what I found.
The email address you found, is the only IDN (i.e. non-ASCII) email address in the RIPE database (so far). It's currently considered a valid value in the RIPE database, as it's composed of Latin-1 characters, and the attribute syntax check passes. There is also an MX record for the domain (although the host dc-eb0309b6496a.xn--zrich-kva.email is currently unreachable for me). However, it may cause inter-operability issues, as the sending mail server needs to handle IDN addresses correctly. DB-WG: should we allow non-ASCII addresses in the RIPE database?
P.S. Not that anybody should really care, but for this one lone resarcher it would be maximally convenient if all domain names represented within the data base were encoded as punycode, where necessary. In fact, it is my belief that 99.99% of them already are, which thus renders the "transition" to that standard essentially pain free.
DB-WG: is punycode for domain names a viable alternative for encoding non-ASCII email addresses? For example, the punycode equivalent abuse@xn--zrich-kva.email is already a valid value for the e-mail (or abuse-c) attribute. Regards Ed Shryane RIPE NCC