Re: OpenLDAP UTF8 values support

[Andrew Findlay <andrew.findlay@skills-1st.co.uk>]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 07:35:34PM +0000, André Rodier wrote:

> On 21/03/18 17:19, Michael Ströder wrote:

> > That's why I proposed 'intlMailAddr' herein:
> > https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-stroeder-mailboxrelatedobject-07#section-2
> > 
> > Note that this attribute only makes sense in case of non-ASCII local part
> > and for use with SMTPUTF8 extensions. I currently only know of one SMTPUTF8
> > implementation (postfix 3.x).

> I am using postfix 3 as well, with dovecot.

So you can probably use that extension. However, most people cannot.
Therefore if you create mail accounts with non-ASCII characters in the
local part those accounts will not be able to exchange mail with 95%
of the world's population. (unless you install a translating gateway,
but then the address seen outside your system will not be the same as
the one inside and your users will get confused).

This is why the LDAP mail attribute is limited to IA5 (7-bit ASCII) syntax.

None of this prevents having UTF8 characters in the 'comment part', as you
do youself ("André" contains one character that cannot be represented in
IA5). This part is not stored in the LDAP mail attribute, which should
be just LHS@RHS.domain

Andrew
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