The domain name registration system for .RU and .РФ domains now supports email addresses which are written using Cyrillic characters only. The Technical Center of Internet – the technical operator of the .RU and .РФ TLDs – assigned its staff to work on this solution. Previously, contact emails of domain administrators or registrants could use a hybrid format only, for example mail@пример.рф, and Cyrillic characters could only be used after the @ symbol. But now both the local part of the address and the domain name can be written using Cyrillic symbols, for example почта@пример.рф.
Making this possible from a technical perspective required a step-by-step approach. Introduced in 2003, the IDNA standard provided for using Unicode characters in domain names, while Punycode taught applications to read non-Latin domain names. A mass push to register Cyrillic domain names followed the launch of the .РФ zone in 2010, although the local part (before the @ symbol) was still written in Latin characters. The adoption of the EAI standard in 2012, along with the expansion of SMTPUTF8, made it possible to use only Cyrillic characters in email addresses by enabling servers to process non-Latin alphabets in local parts.
However, there has been only partial acceptance of this standard, from an infrastructure perspective, although the situation improves every year. According to an annual study carried out by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and the Поддерживаю.РФ project, there were 1,710 unique email serves in the .РФ zone supporting SMTPUTF8 in February 2025, and this figure increased to 1,826 by April 2026, while the .RU zone reported an increase from 21,422 to 24,037, accordingly.
This new function has been integrated into the registration system to remove one of the existing barriers. Users can now provide their contact emails using their mother tongue at the domain name registration stage without having to switch to Latin characters.
“We have upgraded the registration system so that it can effectively receive and store Cyrillic-only email addresses. It is now up to domain registrars to ensure that they support this solution,” Director General of the Technical Center of Internet Alexei Rogdev said.
“Efforts to develop infrastructure for supporting internationalized email address carry on, as demonstrated by the recent studies. The number of unique email servers that can send and receive messages with Cyrillic addresses grows every year. This shows that the technology is becoming increasingly common for email services, and that the ecosystem of the Cyrillic email services in Russia is growing more sustainable,” noted Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and head of the Поддерживаю.РФ project.
