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<h1><span style="font-size: 120%">DRAFT - UA102</span><br>Bridging the Digital Language Divide: <span class="sub">Is Your Email Ready for the Global Market?</span></h1>
<p style="clear: both">Email connects the globe with a click. And it is critical for more than just sending messages; we use it to log in to social networks, identify ourselves for government services, and as the spare key for our online identity. But it's not as universal as you might imagine.</p>
<p>Until recently, email addresses only used Latin characters (A-Z, 0-9), without accents, even for languages such as Russian, Hindi, Thai or Chinese. Only a minority of the worlds population use a Latin alphabet with no accents in their daily lives, and the next billion Internet users are even less likely to do so. To make email for a global audience, people need to be able to write their email address in their native script.</p>
<p>The good news is that's now possible. Email Address Internationalization (EAI) allows email addresses to use all kinds of scripts: <a href>günter@büncher.berlin</a> and <a href>ไทย@อรุณวัฒนามงคล.ไทย</a> are now possible email addresses. However, email software and services need to make specific updates to support them.</p>
<p>There is a growing awareness of the issue, and concrete progress. Examples include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Coremail, XgenPlus, Throughwave and others can host EAI addresses.</li>
<li>PostFix and Exim (widely used Mail Transfer Agents) are EAI Ready.</li>
<li>The deafult Android Email Client, BharatSync Communicator (Android), and EAI (iOS) are EAI Ready.</li>
<li>Gmail, Microsoft Outlook 2016 for Windows, and others can send to and receive from EAI addresses.</li>
</ul>
<p>But more needs to be done. Popular global and regional service providers are, or will be, working on providing full support for EAI. In India DATAMAIL offer free EAI mailboxes in 8 Indian and 2 International languages, and in Russia почта.рус offers free Cyrillic mailboxes.</p>
<p>ICANN's <a class="printlink" href="http://www.uasg.tech/">Universal Acceptance Steering Group</a> has a number of resources to help companies and organisations in this process. These include the <a class="printlink" href="https://uasg.tech/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/UASG014_20170206.pdf">Quick Guide to Email Address Internationalization (EAI)</a> - practical advice for email software and service providers. There is also a <a class="printlink" href="http://www.uasg.tech/documents">full catalogue of relevant technical documents</a> such as the IETF RFCs <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6530">Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email</a>, <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6531">SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email</a>, and <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6855">IMAP Support for UTF-8</a>.</p>
<p>With half the world <a href="http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Email_Statistics_Report_2016-2020_Executive_Summary.pdf">expected</a> to use email in 2020, the time to get EAI ready is now:</p>
<ol>
<li>If your application uses email addresses, ensure it supports UTF-8 characters.</li>
<li>Check your own mail system is EAI ready. If you're not sure, ask your provider.</li>
<li>Test your systems:<ul>
<li>UASG offers a <a class="printlink" href="https://uasg.tech/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/UASG004-Use-Cases-for-UA-Readiness-Evaluation-2017-04-17.pdf">set of live domains and addresses for testing</a></li>
<li>XgenPlus' <a class="printlink" href="https://eai.xgenplus.com">free to use webtool</a> tests servers for EAI readiness.</li></ul></li>
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