In November and December 2020 the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ researched the list of socially significant websites trying to find out how they supported Cyrillic emails. The main task was to determine these websites’ readiness to correctly work with various types of Cyrillic emails in the ccTLDs .RU, .РФ, and .SU.
The official list of socially significant websites includes 371 Russian websites; 253 of them which have feedback forms for users with emails in ccTLD zones .RU, .РФ, and .SU were chosen for the research. The level of acceptance and confirmation of emails was tried out on test addresses, in which the local part (before the @ sign) consisted of Latin characters: test@test-zone.su and test@ test-zone.рф. Also, addresses with Cyrillic characters in the local part were tested, whose domain part can contain both Cyrillic domain names and domain names in Latin letters: тест@zone-test.ru, тест@test-zone.su and тест@тестовая-зона.рф
The results showed that the level of acceptance and confirmation of Cyrillic emails is still very low. From example, only one socially significant website is completely ready to work with Cyrillic emails: all feedback forms at the official website operate correctly (receive and confirm) with all test emails. Another three (less than one percent) websites support all test emails in at least one feedback form.
“As you can see from the research we’ve carried out, there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure Universal Acceptance of Cyrillic domain names and emails by all internet resources. The .РФ domain was created so that Russian users could comfortably communicate and interact with various websites in their native language among other things; poor knowledge of English should not cause any difficulties when using the internet. Today more than 700,000 sites are registered in .РФ, and addresses like сайт.рф are no longer a surprise to find. Now it is necessary to address the problem of accepting Cyrillic emails by all Russian internet resources as soon as possible,” said Coordination Center Chief Analyst Maria Kolesnikova.
Read more about the research results at our website.
Read more about the implementation of the Universal Acceptance of IDNs and EAIs in software products and services at the website of the Поддерживаю.РФ project.
