[rt-users] RT3.8 upgrade: forcing ascii email addresses?

[Ruslan Zakirov]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:39 PM, Mathieu Longtin <mlongtin at dbsoft.ca> wrote:
> I have a hard time believing that the 300M Chinese on the net have an email address spelled with ascii characters, but I just checked with our Exchange server here and on gmail, and both refused a single accented letter in the user name.
>
> So you are right about restricting it.
>
> As for the "smaller field smaller db" excuse, utf8 is the same as ascii as long as you use strictly ascii characters. Also, the last I heard that excuse was for putting centuries in dates, thus saving 2 bytes for each date. We all know where that got us :)

we are talking not about 2 bytes, but about x3 for each row. As far as
I know InnoDB can not pack indexes so every record in the column will
take full possible length in any index using it. Let's avoid
discussion about characters and their length in bytes when we're using
UTF-8, but in mysql it will be 3 times longer than ascii. It's up to
you to decide if it's cheap or not.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ruslan.zakirov at gmail.com [mailto:ruslan.zakirov at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Ruslan Zakirov
> Sent: July 28, 2008 14:29
> To: Mathieu Longtin
> Cc: rt-users at lists.bestpractical.com
> Subject: Re: [rt-users] RT3.8 upgrade: forcing ascii email addresses?
>
> Nope, they can not. Only comment and phrase parts of addr_spec can,
> but address itself can not.
>
> However, may be soon we'll see international domains and situation
> could be changed, but at this point I think it's better to stick with
> ASCII. Smaller fields - smaller indexes - smaller DB.
>
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 8:23 PM, Mathieu Longtin <mlongtin at dbsoft.ca> wrote:
>> Looking at the RT3.8 mysql upgrade script, I found out that most email
>> address fields are set to be ASCII characters only:
>>
>>
>>
>> ALTER TABLE Users MODIFY EmailAddress VARBINARY(120) NULL DEFAULT NULL;
>>
>> ALTER TABLE Users MODIFY EmailAddress VARCHAR(120) CHARACTER SET ascii NULL
>> DEFAULT NULL;
>>
>>
>>
>> This strike me as odd, since email address can contain international
>> characters, AFAIK. Correct me if I'm wrong.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Mathieu Longtin
>>
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>>
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>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Best regards, Ruslan.
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-- 
Best regards, Ruslan.