Re: encoding of message-ids

["W. Trevor King" <wking@tremily.us>]

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On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 09:34:29AM -0400, David Bremner wrote:
> Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes:
> > That said, RFC 2047 suggest that its encodings are only relevant
> > in places where a "text" token would be used.  Message-ID (and
> > References and In-Reply-To) are intended to only contain
> > dot-atom-text tokens.  So probably it would be more correct to
> > avoid applying to these specific fields.
> >
> > i dunno that it's a big deal though, given the analysis above.
>
> I guess there are two seperate issues. One is the (mildly bogus)
> application of RFC2047 decoding to message-ids. The other other is
> the coercion into utf8 from whatever wacky 8bit encoding some
> creative person might use in a message-id.

It looks like there's already an “implicit encodings are complicated”
RFC discussing this issue [1].  RFC 6532 overrides (among other
things) the atext behind message-id [2,3] for message/global messages.
Other related RFCs cover internationalized domain names [4] and
internationalized email addresses [5].  I think we should:

* Store message IDs as NFKC UTF-8 in notmuch (do we already do this?).
* For message/global messages:
  * Convert headers to Unicode using UTF-8 (per RFC 6532).
* For non-message/global messages:
  * Ignore any RFC 2047 =? encoding or RFC 5890 xn-- encoding that may
    be present.
  * Convert to Unicode by percent-encoding [6] (e.g. ‘ü%’ represented
    as the three UTF-8 bytes ‘\xc3\xbc\x25’ would be represented by
    the Unicode ‘%C3%BC%25’).

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6055
[2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.6.4
[3]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.2.3
[4]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5890
[5]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6530
[6]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2
[7]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#section-2

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