Using plain base32 ASCII-compatible encoding in the local part of E-mail addresses

Author

Wu, Pei-Chi

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Inf. Eng., Nat. Penghu Inst. of Technol., Taiwan

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

214

Lastpage

219

Abstract

The structure of Internet mails (or called E-mail) is specified in RFC 2822, which specifies message bodies as flat ASCII text. An E-mail address is in the form of local-part@domain. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has set up a working group on internationalized domain names (IDN). A variety of proposals have been proposed for the format of ASCII-compatible encoding (ACE), which utilizes characters within the alphanumeric range [A-Z][0-9] and hyphen (-). Discussions on internationalization of the local part in E-mail addresses are also raised in the working group. We first address the lexical restrictions in E-mail addresses, system login names, and current E-mail systems. Secondly, we compare several design alternatives: base64, base62, base36, and base32. Thirdly, we address a plain base32 ACE for both IDN and local part of E-mail addresses

Keywords

Internet; electronic mail; file organisation; ASCII-compatible encoding; E-mail addresses; IDN; IETF; Internet Engineering Task Force; RFC 2822; base36; base62; base64; format; internationalized domain names; lexical restrictions; local part; plain base32 ACE; system login names; Computer science; Electronic mail; Encoding; ISO standards; Internet; Postal services; Proposals; Protocols; Sorting; White spaces;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Applications and the Internet, 2002. (SAINT 2002). Proceedings. 2002 Symposium on

Conference_Location

Nara

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1447-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SAINT.2002.994481

Filename

994481