The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) is a community initiative that’s supported by ICANN with a goal of addressing Universal Acceptance – the idea that all domain names work equally well.
EAI (Email Address Internationalization) is an important part of the UASG’s work. Our mission is to encourage wide implementation of EAI and to do this we’re keen to coordination and facilitate discussions among EAI practitioners.
The UASG has launched the “UASG EAI Program” to coordinate interoperability testing and discussion of internationalized email addresses.
Internationalized email addresses have non-ASCII characters in the local part (to the left of the @ symbol in left-to-right scripts) of the email address. They can (and usually do) have an internationalized domain name. For example: Борис@пример.рф
The standards for internationalized email addresses are defined in RFCs 6530, 6531, and 6532. Since they have yet to be widely adopted, there are few industry best-practices for behaviors that are outside their scope.
The goals of the UASG EAI Program are to demonstrate the ability to:
- Create EAI Addresses
- Send mail to EAI Addresses
- Receive mail at EAI addresses
- Identify gaps in the RFCs: things that need to be covered before widespread adoption is realistic
- Identify ‘good practice’ for EAI deployment
- Provide a forum for EAI practitioners to talk.
Potential challenges might include:
- Dealing with spoofing
- What happens when EAI mail goes to a non-EAI compliant platform
- Validating EAI mail outside of email systems
- Dealing with right-to-left scripts (does the domain go on the right or the left?)
- Address normalization
- Dealing with aliases
- And much, much more.
The UASG EAI Program is now seeking participants from the e-mail software and service provider community.
Expectations for service providers:
- Scope a project within your organization to implement support for EAI and the RFCs linked above.
- Provide a single point-of-contact for the UASG EAI Program. (This can be the same person who’s working on the project internally.)
- Allow other members of the UASG EAI Program to access a limited number of test accounts for interoperability testing.
Towards these ends, we’ve created an EAI mailing list and will be working to identify EAI practitioners and facilitating interaction.
If you’d like to participate, please send a note to: don.hollander@icann.org
