Since yesterday one of the leading free email services Gmail allows its users to have correspondence with people whose email addresses have non-Latin characters. Now users of Gmail accounts can exchange emails with addresses like 武@メール.グーグル or иванпетров@почта.рф. Earlier on it was impossible even though way back in 2012 Internet Engineering Task Force developed a new email protocol that allowed internationalized (non-Latin) addresses to be recognized.
After the second national domain .РФ was established in Russia almost all industry experts mentioned that there was a need to create non-Latin email service. Lack of email service, according to them, is one of the limiting factors for development of Cyrillic domain. This is why Coordination Center for TLD RU together with global expert community interested in prompt implementation of IDN for many years actively worked on promotion of that idea among developers and owners of email services. «Almost from the moment of their establishment it was clear that email service should be available in the IDN-domains as well. The process of its creation was quite complex and a start of IDN-mail in Gmail is only a beginning of great work to implement emails using non-Latin alphabets in the whole world and in all email services. I believe that our work in this direction played its role as well”, said Andrei Kolesnikov, Director at Coordination Center.
For more than a half of the world population their native language does not use Latin alphabet, but some other, which highlights the importance of implementation of IDN-mail service for the whole Internet. Google joined this work from the outset, representatives of the company were part of different working groups, that focused on the implementation of a new standard of email. Naturally, Google became one of the first companies that implemented this protocol. Other companies, like Microsoft and Yahoo have yet to do it in their mailing services.
We should also note that Google has taken only one step towards full support of internationalized addresses. Gmail users may keep up a correspondence with these addresses, but cannot create an account like иванпетров@gmail.com. In yesterday’s post by Google, it said that this feature would be available “in the future”, but without exact date.
