International email arises from the combined provision of ''internationalized domain names'' (IDN) and ''email address internationalization'' (EAI).
[Started with: ] The result is email that contains international characters (characters which do not exist in the
ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
character set), encoded as
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...
, in the
email header and in supporting mail transfer protocols. The most significant aspect of this is the allowance of
email address
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...
es (also known as email identities) in most of the world's writing systems, at both interface and transport levels.
Email addresses
Traditional email addresses are limited to characters from the
English alphabet
The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word ''alphabet'' is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, '' alpha'' and '' beta''. ...
and a few other special characters.
The following are valid traditional email addresses:
Abc@example.com (English, ASCII)
Abc.123@example.com (English, ASCII)
user+mailbox/department=shipping@example.com (English, ASCII)
!#$%&'*+-/=?^_`.~@example.com (English, ASCII)
"Abc@def"@example.com (English, ASCII)
"Fred\ Bloggs"@example.com (English, ASCII)
"Joe.\\Blow"@example.com (English, ASCII)
A Russian might wish to use ''иван.сергеев@пример.рф'' as their identifier but be forced to use a transcription such as ''ivan.sergeev@example.ru'' or even some other completely unrelated identifier instead. The same is true of Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities that do not use
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...
s, but also applies to users from non-English-speaking European countries whose desired addresses might contain
diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s (e.g. ''André'' or ''Płużyna''). As a result, email users are forced to identify themselves using non-native scripts, which may result in errors due to ambiguity of transliteration (for example,
иван.сергеев
may become
ivan.sergeev
,
ivan.sergeyev
, or something else). Alternatively, developers of email systems must compensate for this by converting identifiers from their native scripts to ASCII scripts and back again at the user interface layer.
International email, by contrast, uses
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
characters encoded as
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...
—allowing for the encoding the text of addresses in most of the world's writing systems.
The following are all valid ''international
email address
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineer ...
es'':
(
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
,
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
)
ಬೆಂಬಲ@ಡೇಟಾಮೇಲ್.ಭಾರತ (
Kannada
Kannada (; ಕನ್ನಡ, ), originally romanised Canarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in southwestern India, with minorities in all neighbouring states. It has around 47 million native s ...
, Unicode)
अजय@डाटा.भारत (
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...
, Unicode)
квіточка@пошта.укр (
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
, Unicode)
χρήστης@παράδειγμα.ελ (
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, Unicode)
Dörte@Sörensen.example.com (
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
, Unicode)
коля@пример.рф (
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
, Unicode)
UTF-8 headers
Although the traditional format for email header section allows non-ASCII characters to be included in the value portion of some of the header fields using MIME-encoded words (e.g. in display names or in a ''Subject'' header field), MIME-encoding must not be used to encode other information in a header, such as an email address, or header fields like ''Message-ID'' or ''Received''. Moreover, the MIME-encoding requires extra processing of the header to convert the data to and from its MIME-encoded word representation, and harms readability of a header section.
The 2012 standards RFC 6532 and RFC 6531 allow the inclusion of
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
characters in a header content using UTF-8 encoding, and their transmission via SMTP—but in practice support is only slowly rolling out.
Interoperability via downgrading
Domain internationalization works by downgrading. UTF-8 parts, known as U-Labels, are transformed into A-Labels via an ''ad-hoc'' method called IDNA. For example,
sörensen.example.com
is encoded as
xn--srensen-90a.example.com
. In 2003, when the need was addressed, that seemed easier than checking that all DNS software could comply with UTF-8 strings, although in theory DNS can transport binary data. This encoding is needed before issuing DNS queries.
Since traditional email standards constrain all email header values to ASCII only characters, it is possible that the presence of UTF-8 characters in email headers decreases the stability and reliability of transporting such email. This is because some email servers do not support these characters. Checking compliance with UTF-8 strings must be done software package by software package (see
#Adoption below.) There was an experimental method proposed by the IETF, by which email could be somehow downgraded into the legacy all-ASCII format which all standard email servers support.
[ This proposal was deemed too cumbersome; the meaning of the left hand side part of an email address is local to the target server, and so there is no way to check whether ]xn--''something''
is a valid user name, used in some domain. It was later obsoleted in 2012.
Standards framework
The set of Internet RFC documents RFC 6530, RFC 6531, RFC 6532, and RFC 6533, all of them published in February 2012, define mechanisms and protocol extensions needed to fully support internationalized email addresses. These changes include an SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typical ...
extension and extension of email header syntax to accommodate UTF-8 data. The document set also includes discussion of key assumptions and issues in deploying fully internationalized email.
Adoption
* 2013-11-14: The Bat!
The Bat! is an email client for the Microsoft Windows operating system, developed by Ritlabs, SRL, a company based in Chişinău, Moldova. There are two versions: a Home version and a Professional version. The Professional version includes a po ...
Email Client implemented support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) in email addresses.
* 2014-07-15: Postfix mailer started supporting Internationalized Email, also known as EAI or SMTPUTF8
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typica ...
, defined in RFC 6530 .. RFC 6533. Initial support was made available with a development version 20140715, and on 2015-02-08 ended up in a stable release 3.0.0. This supports UTF-8 in SMTP or LMTP sender addresses, recipient addresses, and message header values.
* 2014-07-19: XgenPlus Email Server started supporting IDN based email, also known as support for SMTPUTF8
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typica ...
, especially for .भारत domain.
* 2014-08-05: Google announced that Gmail will recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters, with more support for internationalization to follow. Their mailers (MX MTA) are announcing support for ''SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email'' (SMTPUTF8, RFC 6531).
* 2014-09-30: Message Systems announced that their product ''Momentum'' (versions 4.1 and 3.6.5) provides SMTPUTF8
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typica ...
support, the email address internationalization extension to the SMTP protocol, allowing emails to be sent to new, non-western addressed recipients.
* 2014-10-22: the version 2.10.0 of Amavis
Amavis is an open-source content filter for electronic mail, implementing mail message transfer, decoding, some processing and checking, and interfacing with external content filters to provide protection against spam and viruses and other ma ...
mail content filter was released which added support for SMTPUTF8
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typica ...
, EAI, and IDN.
* 2016-12-07: почта.рус Launches fully Russian (Cyrillic) email in Moscow through a press conference.
* Chief Minister Vasundhara
Vasundhara Kashyap is an Indian actress and model in Tamil language films.
Career
Vasundhara was born to a Tamil father and a Maharashtriann mother. She first appeared in the 2006 Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group nativ ...
Raje of Rajasthan launched one Free Email address @rajasthan.in and @राजस्थान.भारत domain on 3 December 2017. Rajasthan state became the World's first state to provide email address to every citizen in their own language.
* 2016-10-18: Data Xgen Technologies launched a free linguistic email address under the name "DATAMAIL". In support of Digital India
Digital India is a campaign launched by the Government of India in order to ensure that the Government's services are made available to citizens electronically by improved online infrastructure and by increasing Internet connectivity or making ...
this made an Indian email app stop that supports IDN (internationalized domain name
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin, simplified ...
) in Hindi (हिन्दी), Gujarati (ગુજરાતી), Urdu (اردو), Punjabi (ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਦੇ), Tamil (தமிழ்), Telgu (తెలుగు), Bengali (বাংলা), Marathi (मराठी), Latin English. DATAMAIL has launched international languages for the countries using Arabic (العَرَبِيَّة), Russian (русский)and Chinese (汉语/漢語) as their base language.
* 2017-03-07: Apple's App Store
An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the co ...
approves publication of an iOS app
The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Deve ...
with EAI support.
* 2017-12-27: Microsoft announces coming IDN email support on Office 365 and also announces partner XgenPlus hosting IDN mailboxes.
* 2018-01-03: Microsoft Adds E-Mail Internationalization to Exchange Online.
* 2018-09-18: Courier-MTA
The Courier Mail Server is a mail transfer agent (MTA) server that provides SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SMAP, webmail, and mailing list services with individual components. It is best known for its IMAP server component.
Courier can function as an intermedi ...
releases support for Unicode E-mail messages, in UTF-8, for all Courier packages. In addition, Courier-IMAP uses Unicode (UTF8) for names of maildir folders.
* 2020-07-29: DataMail launched Kannada language email address to break the language barrier
See also
* Internationalized domain name
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin, simplified ...
* Email Address Internationalization (EAI)
* Unicode and email Many email clients now offer some support for Unicode. Some clients will automatically choose between a legacy encoding and Unicode depending on the mail's content, either automatically or when the user requests it.
Technical requirements for sendi ...
* IETF
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...
* ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...
References
Bibliography
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External links
EAI Working Group Status Page
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
{{DEFAULTSORT:International E-Mail
Email