The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) has published the results of its research on the acceptance of internationalized email addresses. UASG experts evaluated the UA compliance of the top 1,000 websites (according to Alexa). However, they had to extend the list, as only 527 websites of the top 1,000 had email forms for feedback.
The experts created six types of email addresses: 1. ascii@ascii.newshort - test@test.exp, 2. ascii@ascii.newlong - test@test.example, 3. ascii@idn.ascii - test@普遍接受-测试.org, 4. unicode@ascii.ascii - 测试1@test.org, 5. unicode@idn.idn - 测试5@普遍接受-测试.世界) и 6. arabic.arabic@arabic(RTL) - دون@رسيل.السعودية. The experiment showed that 97 percent of the websites accepted the first type of addresses, followed by 84 and 50 percent of the websites that accepted the second and the third types. The situation was not so positive with the other three types: the acceptance percentage was 7–13 percent. Only five websites of the first 100 accepted all six types of addresses.
The authors of the report note that the acceptance of the first three types has increased compared to the 2017 report, while the acceptance of the other three remained the same, with a decrease in some cases. However, the previous research used a different methodology, so the comparison may not be equitable. The researchers say the wider use of HTML5 is the main issue. It uses "input type="email" stock field, which is not compliant with UA. This is why websites do not see internationalized domain names as correct. The developers of HTML5 wanted to achieve compliance with UA back in 2017, but the situation hasn’t changed much since then. The authors of the report suggest that UASG and other interested parties cooperate with HTML5 developers (W3C and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, WHATWG) more actively to resolve this as soon as possible.
