Slashdot Mirror
Gmail Recognizes Addresses Containing Non-Latin Characters
An anonymous reader writes In response to the creation in 2012 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) of "a new email standard that supports addresses incorporating non-Latin and accented Latin characters", Google has now made it possible for its Gmail users to "send emails to, and receive emails from, people who have these characters in their email addresses." Their goal is to eventually allow its users to create Gmail addresses utilizing these characters.
Finally I can get motörhead@gmail.com!
I would imagine that there they implemented RFC6532, which involves a lot more than changing a regular expression
From what I can tell, a mail server has two options when receiving this mail:
Accept it.
Reject it.
The default, with software that doesn't understand this RFC yet (which seems to be... just about everything), is to reject. So trying to use this as an email is not only going to mess up every form you try to fill in online (because they won't see it as an email address either), but quite likely just gets you bouncebacks from everyone you email.
What was needed was surely a system similar to the IDN system for internationalisation, which would allow those with ASCII-only DNS servers etc. to STILL WORK, by converting the Unicode characters to ASCII subsets and then sending the email as normal, through the entire PLANET-worth of working email servers out there that could accept it.
Having a content negotiation option at the SMTP level, that mail servers have to implement and handle specifically, is just ridiculous, and even with GMail's kickstart it could be decades before you can guarantee that your UTF-8 email address will work across the Internet and even then there'll be some old legacy server that will just bounce all your email BECAUSE of that character set in your address. And it will be perfectly legitimate to do so.
However, as others have pointed out, if this goes through, it will be nigh-on impossible to spot phished/faked email addresses, just like it is with IDN links unless you know how to find the original ASCII-encoding of them.
This is a real concern,and probably why gmail is not yet allowing internationalised gmail addresses. Most email names could be spoofed using Cyrillic characters which look exactly the same as latin ones. How could you tell if the "c" in chrisq@gmal.com really was a latin 'c' or a cyrillic Es?