Soon in a mail box near you: Internationalized e-mail addresses
8 September 2008 | Published in Internet, Internet Engineering Task Force, Software | 2 Comments
The EAI working group of the IETF has finished (part of) its work on the interationalization of e-mail addresses. This, together with Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) will make it possible to send e-mail messages to non-7 bit ASCII addresses e.g. måtte@københavn.dk or 中国@中国.中国 .
There are 3 RFCs, covering changes to the SMTP protocol, e-mail message format and delivery Status Notifications.
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5335.txt
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5336.txt
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5337.txt
They still have the “Experimental” status, meaning they are not yet a standard. How long this will take to see them in actual products is difficult to guess. Software vendors tend to look at market demand before implementing new features . Hence, it is time to pressure your favourite e-mail client vendor. Tell them you need that. For Microsoft Outlook, you could try here. For Apple Mail, there. For Mozilla Thunderbird, still somewhere else.
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8 September 2008 at 17:23 (#)
Does this mean I get to have an @Veriѕign.com email address too?
Patrick, do you know what has happened to the ISOC wiki? Taken offline because of spam?
8 September 2008 at 19:57 (#)
You are right, homographs are a real issue. This is why, among others, there will be a limited number of allowed characters in ccTLD IDNs. You will not be able to use, say chinese characters to register a name in an arabic domain. As you have demonstrated, however, the system is not bulletproof.