🚀 go-pugleaf

I agree with Patrick's stance on this.  Without looking at the
SMTP standard, I'ld wager a (small) sum that they don't
specify the use of the *characters* "From: " to tag the
sender of the message, but they do specify the byte
sequence <46> <72> <6F> <6D> <3A> <20>, which if sent to a tty
expecting ASCII causes "From: " to appear, but if the tty expects
Unicode something totally different appears.

The problem is that many user-interfaces present the keywords
(key byte-sequences?) - expecting the keywords to convey their
meaning simply by act of being displayed.

More to brass tacks on the item of "both parties must agree
to use non-French" - if the other party has agreed to receive
messages in SMTP format I would take that to mean they have
agreed to receive messages that contain byte-sequences that
can represent English words if the byte-sequences are
treated as characters encoded by ASCII. (Whew!)

Another approach to take on the issue is to treat the SMTP keywords as the
"envelope" of the message.  I strongly doubt Canada requires
I use French to address a piece of physical mail I send to
a new corespondent in Quebec.  (If they do, I may be subject
to arrest next time I visit!)  Furthermore, the US postal
service attaches a postal cancellation mark containing English
text - after I drop the letter into the letter-box.  The SMTP
information attached to an e-mail can be treated as the electronic
equivilant of the envelope.

I think your efforts will have the best payoff by disassociating
your user interface from the keywords in SMTP.  (eg: recognize
"English: " but display "French: ".

As Patrick stated, this reminds me also of the "should program
keywords be translatable" issue.  I am also reminded of the
efforts of US fundamentalist Christian groups to ban programs which
contained the byte sequence <x36> <x36> <x36> anywhere in
their executable image.

Dave

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David B. Schnepper                              Borland
InterBase Internationalization Engineer         InterBase Unit
Internet: daves@borland.com                     1800 Green Hills Road
+1 408-439-2045 (voice) +1 408-439-7808 (FAX)   Scotts Valley, CA  95067 USA