The third article on Universal Acceptance (UA) is dedicated to the technology, settings and safety of emails in Russian. It is created by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ as part of the Поддерживаю.рф project.
Internationalized domain names (IDN), for example using letters of the Russian alphabet, can be used to create an email address. Both of its parts, the domain and local (before @) can contain letters of the national alphabet. The results of a study carried out by the Поддерживаю.рф project show that about 40 percent of Russian companies have a domain in the Cyrillic ccTLD .РФ and another 20 percent of them use Cyrillic email addresses: they look more creative and are easier to remember or spell.
For such addresses to work properly, all the sending and receiving mail servers through which the email passes must support the extended SMTPUTF8 protocol. The article contains advice on how to check whether your email server supports internationalized addresses: you can use a special service on Поддерживаю.рф’s website, try sending an email to тест@поддерживаю.рф or create an email whose domain part will contain non-Latin characters in the control panel of your hosting email address.
“Today most Russian hosting services allow email addresses with Cyrillic domain parts, for example, in .РФ; but the local part, before @, remains Latin. So if you see that an email agent or server does not support internationalized emails or supports them only partially, turn to their technical support and ask them to implement it. This way you will make a contribution to spreading Universal Acceptance and expand ways in which your language can be used online,” said Maria Kolesnikova, chief analyst at the Coordination Center, chair of the UA Local Initiative for CIS and Eastern Europe.
The article also says how to protect yourself from fake email addresses. The universal advice is not to use services that allow mixing characters from different alphabets.
Read more about safe work with IDNs and ways to avoid homoglyphic attacks in the second article of the series, IDNs: Rules of safe use and how IDNs function in IDNs: Why they are necessary and how they work.
All educational articles on Universal Acceptance can also be found in the knowledge base of the Digital Dictation national educational event to determine the level of digital literacy held by ROCIT every year.
“Universal Acceptance of Cyrillic domains and emails is another step towards a more comfortable online environment for Russian speakers, allowing them to work completely in their mother tongue online. It is very important for people to know they can do this and to do this safely and effectively,” said ROCIT Director Sergei Grebennikov.
