The website of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ has published the report Evaluation of the Level of Universal Acceptance of Email Addresses by Websites in Russia and the World in 2020. It was prepared by the Coordination Center on the basis of a report by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), Country-Based Evaluation of Websites for Acceptance of Email Addresses in 2020, and additional surveys carried out by the Coordination Center.
The report presents an analysis of the results of a survey that involved the most popular 1,000 websites in 20 countries, conducted at the request of UASG in 2019/2020, as well as other surveys on the acceptance of local addresses by Russian websites held by the Coordination Center.
The survey at the request of UASG was conducted between November 2019 and February 2020 by experts from the New Zealand’s research firm Curia Market Research, working under a contract with ICANN. ICANN provided the firm with a list of between 60 and 90 of the most popular websites in each of the 20 countries. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ used the Yandex.Radar rankings when forming such a list for 2020. In addition, the Coordination Center conducted its own testing on acceptance of email addresses that use Cyrillic by popular Russian websites.
The survey showed that some 94 percent of popular Russian websites accept email addresses in new Latin top-level domains with a length of no more than three characters (for instance, test@ua-test19.bet). Worldwide, 98 percent of websites accept such addresses, and in 12 countries out of 20 the acceptance level is 100 percent. Thus, 6 percent of Russian websites accept email addresses only in the traditional TLDs such as .com, .net, and others, and these account for only 2 percent of websites worldwide.
Almost one in five of the most popular Russian websites (19 percent) accepts email addresses that are written in Cyrillic letters (such as пример@тестовая-зона.рф). Germany shows the highest acceptance level of email addresses in national languages, 28 percent (the address süß@schönes.köln was tested). Russia ranks second. At the same time, almost 90 percent of the tested websites from 20 countries do not accept email addresses written in Chinese and Arabic: chinese@chinese.chinese and arabic.arabic@arabic.
Germany is the leader in universal acceptance of various types of email addresses. Russia ranks 10th among the 20 participating countries and shows relatively high levels of acceptance of internationalized email addresses. In terms of accepting addresses in the local language, Russian websites rank second (19 percent). The country also ranks second in terms of accepting addresses in Chinese and Arabic (17 percent each). Interestingly, in China (which is the leader in terms of the number of registered IDN domain names), the acceptance level of Chinese-language addresses (such as 测试@普遍适用.公司) is lower than in the popular websites of Germany, Russia and Kuwait. In Russia, the leaders in accepting Cyrillic email addresses are the websites of online stores (30 percent), followed by educational websites (25 percent), websites of banks (20 percent) and government services websites (17 percent). Worldwide, the highest acceptance level is shown by the websites of banks while the websites of online stores have the lowest acceptance level.
“The survey yielded interesting results. For instance, the presence of the world’s second largest IDN domain .РФ is not considered by all Russian developers and website owners when arranging validity checks for the information about domain names and email addresses provided by users. In addition, despite the fact that there are currently 9 million domain names in national languages throughout the world with their number increasing by 20 percent every year, even in the countries with the highest number of registered internationalized domain names, the level of acceptance of email addresses that use characters from their national alphabets is relatively low. So there is something to work on. The project Поддерживаю.РФ and the regional universal acceptance group will continue their work to further promote the introduction of Universal Acceptance in Russia and the region,” said Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
