[UA-EAI] What problem does this solve: transcribing foreign-script email addreses

[John Levine]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2021, Asmus Freytag (c) wrote:
>> I still have no idea what problem people are trying to solve here. ...

> It's very simple. The sender's name is one of the elements you use to manage 
> your mail collection.
>
> You use it to scan the list of headers to find what you want, if. You use it 
> to search (and you usually don't have to cut&paste to be able to do a 
> search). You type the from name (or part of it) when you want to send a 
> message that's not a reply. And so on.

So far so good.

> All of these tasks become more difficult if you can neither pronounce nor 
> type a name. Adding a transcription to the friendly name enables this without 
> requiring the sender to maintain an account with a "non-native" user name.

There's a whole lot of assumptions here about what might or might not be 
in the From header comment already and how helpful a transcription might 
be, or for that matter, how it's supposed to work in the other direction, 
e.g., the address is in Greek and I speak Korean.

Like I said, we consistently find that our intuitions about what is good 
user interface are wrong.

Regards,
John Levine, john.levine at standcore.com
Standcore LLC