Experts from ICANN's Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) together with Donuts specialists have conducted a research on how many of the popular websites support email addresses registered in new and internationalized domains. They analyzed 749 websites from the Alexa's TOP 1000 that have a field to type in an email address. As it turned out, the situation with Universal Acceptance is still far from being good. The majority of websites are still unable to recognize addresses in new and internationalized domains. Websites of such companies as Twitter and IBM as well as newspapers like The Financial Times are among them.
22% of studied popular webpages do not support addresses in the new domains, the names of which are longer than 4 symbols, even though there are over 800 of such domains at the moment. Less than 30% of websites support addresses in all internationalized domains (the total number of which is over 150). Arabic symbols are a special case – they are only recognized in less than 10% of the cases. In total, less than 7% of all websites according to study's conclusion are capable of recognizing and supporting all existing types of email addresses.
The problem is that websites use so-called Regular Expression (RegEx) to check the validity of email addresses. RegEx is in a way a mini programming language, which matches character sets with established standards. In addition, many programmers user ready0amde RegEx, which were created quite a long time ago and do not take into account modern realities. For example, the length of a top-level domain name can't exceed 4 digits and usage of non-Latin characters is forbidden.
