[anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses

Why?

It’s an EAI issue more than anything else.

If your email client or server can’t handle UTF-8 then doing the punycode conversion is unlikely to help

I’d also encourage RIPE NOT to force Latin characters only – the RIPE region covers multiple languages which are not Latin based and if anything it should be leading by example

More details on EAI and UA issues here:
https://uasg.tech/
Regards

Michele


--
Mr Michele Neylon
Blacknight Solutions
Hosting, Colocation & Domains
https://www.blacknight.com/
https://blacknight.blog/
Intl. +353 (0) 59  9183072
Direct Dial: +353 (0)59 9183090
Personal blog: https://michele.blog/
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From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net> on behalf of David Guo via anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net>
Reply to: David Guo <david at xtom.com>
Date: Tuesday 19 November 2019 at 13:34
To: Thomas Hungenberg <th at cert-bund.de>, "anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net" <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses

Oh you already tried and it works. I suggest RIPE can convert the IDN domains to punnycode on database.

________________________________
From: David Guo <david at xtom.com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 2:32:54 PM
To: Thomas Hungenberg <th at cert-bund.de>; anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses

Did you try IDN / Punnycode converter?

Try abuse at xn--zrich-kva.email ?

________________________________
From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces at ripe.net> on behalf of Thomas Hungenberg <th at cert-bund.de>
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 2:27:13 PM
To: anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net <anti-abuse-wg at ripe.net>
Subject: [anti-abuse-wg] Non-ASCII characters in abuse-mailbox addresses

Hi,

some abuse contacts registered with RIPE use non-ascii characters with
the abuse-mailbox addresses, e.g.

% Abuse contact for '195.78.76.0 - 195.78.77.255' is 'abuse at zürich.email'

However, the corresponding MTA does not support SMTPUTF8:

7B579403C6: to=<abuse at zürich.email>,
relay=mail.xn--zrich-kva.email[109.95.241.50]:25, delay=0.33,
delays=0.01/0/0.32/0, dsn=5.6.7, status=bounced (SMTPUTF8 is required, but was
not offered by host mail.xn--zrich-kva.email[109.95.241.50])

(In this particular case, sending email to the IDNA representation of the
email address <abuse at xn--zrich-kva.email> works.)

In our experience, using umlauts and other non-ascii characters in
(the host part of) email addresses still cause a lot of problems in general.
Even if the recipient's MX supports SMTPUTF8 correctly, MTAs on the transport
way may fail to handle SMTPUTF8 messages.

To prevent such problems and make sure all abuse mailboxes can be addressed,
I wonder if the values of abuse-mailbox attributes should be restricted to
ASCII characters only.

What do you think?


     - Thomas

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