Saturday, April 25, 2009

Multi-lingual Email Address

Multi-lingual email addresses, or Email Address Internationalization (EAI) as it is more commonly known, has been around for a while. Netaka, a Canadian firm, has been providing an email service for the Chinese community that supports the use of Chinese characters in the email address.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has also assigned a committee to oversee the internationalized email effort and the result has been the RFC4952, which in combination with RFC3490 for Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) defines a standard for supporting email addresses with international character sets.

The effort for internationalizing email addresses has been fairly recent, so it will be a while before email servers start supporting other charactersets.

No comments:

Post a Comment