International email explained

International email arises from the combined provision of internationalized domain names (IDN)[1] and email address internationalization (EAI).[2] The result is email that contains international characters (characters which do not exist in the ASCII character set), encoded as UTF-8, in the email header and in supporting mail transfer protocols. The most significant aspect of this is the allowance of email addresses (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 and a few other special characters.[3]

The following are valid traditional email addresses:

stellyamburrr985@gmail.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 scripts, but also applies to users from non-English-speaking European countries whose desired addresses might contain diacritics (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 characters encoded as UTF-8—allowing for the encoding the text of addresses in most of the world's writing systems.[4]

The following are all valid international email addresses:

(Chinese, Unicode) ಬೆಂಬಲ@ಡೇಟಾಮೇಲ್.ಭಾರತ (Kannada, Unicode) अजय@डाटा.भारत (Hindi, Unicode) квіточка@пошта.укр (Ukrainian, Unicode) χρήστης@παράδειγμα.ελ (Greek, Unicode) Dörte@Sörensen.example.com (German, Unicode) коля@пример.рф (Russian, 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 characters in a header content using UTF-8 encoding, and their transmission via SMTP—but in practice support is only slowly rolling out.[5]

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

  1. 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.[2] [6] 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.[7]

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 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.

Unicode also has recommended Email Security Profiles for Identifiers.

Adoption

The ICANN-sponsored Universal Acceptance Working Group is working make EAI accepted in more places and publishes annual reports on acceptance.

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

Notes and References

  1. Started with: 3491 . Paul Hoffman . Marc Blanchet . Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) . 7 March 2003.
  2. Started with: 4952 . 7 February 2007 . Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email . John C Klensin . YangWoo Ko.
  3. RFC 5322: Internet Message Format
  4. RFC 6530: Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email
  5. News: Mackie . Kurt . Exchange Online Getting E-Mail Internationalization Support . 1 November 2018 . Redmond magazine . 2 January 2018.
  6. SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email Addresses . 8 July 2008 . Jiankang YAO . Wei MAO . 5336.
  7. Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email . February 2012 . J. Klensin . Y. Ko . 6530.
  8. News: Afilias and .JO Registry Bring Native Language E-mail to Arabic Internet Users. https://web.archive.org/web/20101115011426/http://www.prweb.com/releases/Afilias/Arabic_IDN_e-mail/prweb4719214.htm. dead. November 15, 2010. 2010-10-29.
  9. News: The Bat! 6.0 with Unicode and IDN support: The Bat! speaks many languages. 2013-11-14.
  10. http://marc.info/?l=postfix-users&m=140544541431076
  11. http://marc.info/?l=postfix-announce&m=142343583531368
  12. Web site: Government to Offer Free .bharat Domain Name With .in Purchase. 2016-08-13.
  13. Web site: IDN Email supported by XgenPlus email server. xgenplus.com. 2016-08-13.
  14. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-more-global-email.html
  15. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/message-systems-introduces-latest-version-of-momentum-with-new-api-driven-capabilities-277568381.html
  16. http://lists.amavis.org/pipermail/amavis-users/2014-October/003252.html
  17. News: 2016-10-22 . Data Xgen Technologies launches email address in Indian languages . 2016-10-18 . Deccan Chronicle.
  18. News: DataMail: World's first free linguistic email service supports eight India languages - The Economic Times. The Economic Times. 2016-10-22.
  19. Web site: "Почта.рус" хочет избавиться от препятствий.
  20. Web site: Cyrillic email launched in .РУС . cctld.ru . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20161220125920/https://cctld.ru/en/news/news_detail.php?ID=11042 . 2016-12-20.
  21. Web site: EAI Mail. . 7 March 2017 . apple.com .
  22. News: EAI support announcement . 9 November 2018 . The Microsoft Exchange Team Blog.
  23. Web site: Microsoft announcement of EAI in India. Hollander. Don. Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG). 21 February 2018. en-US. 2019-07-06.
  24. Web site: Microsoft Adds E-Mail Internationalization to Exchange Online. Kurt Mackie . 3 January 2018 . MCPmag .
  25. New releases of Courier packages . 18 September 2018 . 5 July 2019 . courier-announce . Sam Varshavchik.
  26. Web site: 2020-07-29 . DataMail launched Kannada language email address to break the language barrier . 2022-06-14 . Business News This Week . en-US.

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