On May 16, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held an online training session on implementing support for email address internationalization (EAI). Today there are over nine million domain names that contain characters of national alphabets on the internet. The number of these domain names, which are used to address websites and emails, grows by 20 percent annually. The participants in the training learned how to implement support for IDN and EAI in email agents in practice.
The training session was held by Igor Lidin, leading developer at the Technical Center of Internet (TCI) and expert on the introduction of IDN emails. He spoke about the basic notions in Universal Acceptance, as well as the key EAI concepts and the technical specifics of its implementation. During the stream, Igor Lidin demonstrated how to configure and check the Postfix and Courier email services for support of EAI and the protocol SMTPUTF8.
“When the internet first came out, nobody thought about internationalization. However, as the internet developed in the world, the need for IDNs arose. And Universal Acceptance (UA) means universal recognition and equal support of multilanguage identifiers, such as domain names and online accounts. Moreover, Universal Acceptance means supporting new and unusual first-level Latin domains,” Igor Lidin noted.
The training session was watched by technical specialists, email service system administrators, and developers who plan to implement EAI technologies in their software as well as those who are interested in new technologies and the internet. After the training, the participants had a good grasp on the main concepts related to the internationalization of the key email technologies as well as the idea of EAI. Discussion covered the problems of implementing EAI support at length. At the end, the participants learned how to configure and check support for EAI in open software.
The event was held with the support of the Coordination Center’s project Поддерживаю.рф. The project is dedicated to developing an ecosystem that supports domain names and emails in national languages, first of all, in the Cyrillic domain .РФ. Its main aim is to adapt software to support IDNs and EAI in Russian, among other languages. The materials, based on the UASG training course, were adapted for the Russian audience.
