[UA-discuss] [UA-EAI] Request for review: Report on Evaluation of Websites for Acceptance of E-mail Addresses, 2019

[John R. Levine]

> Please find attached a recent study undertaken on the request of UASG on the Global Evaluation of Websites for Acceptance of E-mail Addresses 2019, for your review and feedback.
> Please send your feedback on ua-discuss at icann.org<mailto:ua-discuss at icann.org> list (visit https://uasg.tech/subscribe to subscribe) by 29 July. We look forward to your input.

As I understand it, the tests checked whether a web form accepted an 
address, but it didn't check whether the site could actually send mail to 
that address.  There's a lot of places where EAI mail can fail between the 
browser and the recipient's MTA, so the report should make it clear that 
the percentages reported are an upper bound, with the actual numbers 
likely being somewhat less.

With respect to the HTML5 pattern for e-mail addresses, I have talked to 
people in WHATWG about it.  That pattern is correct for ASCII addresses 
and it's not going to change to an EAI pattern because that would lead to 
web sites with ASCII mail systems accepting addresses to which they can't 
send mail.  They would be open to adding a new "eaimail" input type that 
accepts EAI addresses, to allow an easy upgrade when sites have EAI 
capable back ends.

Nothing is going to happen in WHATWG until one of their large members says 
they'll implement it which hasn't happened.  I've made some inquiries and 
gotten polite responses, but I can't do much more since I have no funding.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly