ICANN has officially announced the introduction of support for internationalized email addresses in its IT infrastructure. This means that ICANN staff are now able to send and receive messages from these addresses, and it is a very important step towards universal acceptance: achieving Universal Acceptance is one of ICANN's 2025 strategic priorities. The emphasis is on the widest possible distribution and development of internationalized domains and on preparation for the second stage of the program of new generic top-level domains.
At the same time, the first internationalized generic top-level domains were included in the DNS root zone on May 5, 2010 - these were Arabic versions of the national domains of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Following them, on May 12, 2010, the Russian Cyrillic domain .РФ was included in the DNS root zone. Thus, it took almost 14 years for the organization responsible for universal acceptance, which declared it a strategic goal, to address the issue of universal acceptance within its own IT systems. ICANN is involved in developing domain management policies, not developing software, and this was the main reason for such a long implementation period. ICANN staff receive and send email messages using programs developed not by ICANN itself, but by leading technology companies. Still, ICANN's work with these companies to address universal acceptance could likely be more proactive. ICANN also notes that work continues to ensure that all relevant internal ICANN systems are fully accessible for universal access.
Let us recall that the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ announced the readiness of its information systems to work with internationalized domains and email addresses in the spring of 2023 at the regional conference “Universal Acceptance Day”, held in Yerevan and timed to coincide with the first Global Day of Universal Acceptance. In particular, users have the opportunity to send requests through the websites of the Coordination Center and its projects using Cyrillic email addresses, and the Coordination Center uses completely Cyrillic email addresses for communications with the owners of such email addresses
