So, about those email validation regexes...
A first step toward more global email
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: A first step toward more global email
#22Interesting. Question: What do you guys think it'd take to get the other N% of email providers, clients, servers, and whatnot onboard? Is this an ipV6-like situation?
Hardly. Almost all email moves between only a handful of companies. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. Between them they dominate the landscape. It only takes a handful of engineers and product managers at these companies to decide "let's do this" and pretty quickly such email addresses can become a reality for at least person to person mail. Of course for them to become usable for signing up to websites, mai…
This comment is pretty frightening to me. Email is very often used for "mission critical" purposes, not just for exchanging messages with other users (let alone just "with other users of the top 5 providers"). I know that enabling international characters is important for a whole range of reasons, and that's worth some significant costs. But email infrastructure is emphatically not something where "works most of the time" or even "works 95% of the time" is good enough. I think there really is a need for pretty substantial attention to backward compatibility in this case.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#23So, about those email validation regexes...
A refresher, for people who might not have come across this before: parsing even a limited subset of all possible email addresses with a regex is hard
Re: A first step toward more global email
#24Maybe this is a good thing but I wouldn't have an email address with accented characters (and my name contains two of them). It would be quite awkward if I gave someone my address and he/she couldn't simply type it with his/her default keyboard configuration.
QR codes to the rescue!
Doesn't help if someone is dictating it to me.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#25Maybe this is a good thing but I wouldn't have an email address with accented characters (and my name contains two of them). It would be quite awkward if I gave someone my address and he/she couldn't simply type it with his/her default keyboard configuration.
I agree with this. Also, many years ago when they started allowing unicode domain names several of my Japan friends thought Japan would switch over to unicode domain names. It's now been several years and I have yet to see a single Japanese website with a Japanese character domain name. (I'm sure someone will pull one up just now ;)
The problem (one problem?) is legacy devices. At the time most phones and possibly even some browsers had limited input to URL fields in ascii only. The keyboard they'd show when you when to enter a URL didn't provide the input methods for non-ascii text.
So, having a non-ascii domain would have only lost you customers. Or made it more confusing. As in do I go to mitsubishi.com or 三菱.com? (三菱.jp is registered but googling for site:三菱.jp brings up zero hits)
I'm not saying I'm against non-ascii email names. I'm just suggesting it's not likely to change much anytime soon. Just a guess
Re: A first step toward more global email
#26I am a Dane. We use the latin alphabet plus æ, ø and å. Some names, like Søren or Åse, can't be written in pure ascii, but the people who have these names tend to just have addresses like soren@whatever.dk or soeren@whatever.dk. It seems preposterous for me to risk breaking the web over something so relatively trivial. Heck my name is ascii compatible but it isn't available.
It's not trivial. This is 2014, not 1960. If computers should do one thing correctly, it should be to display text. As it happens, only a small subset of languages can be displayed correctly in email addresses. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. Sure, it's understandable as email is an old and a widely used protocol, so changes are difficult to push through. But it's not acceptable, and it's not "relatively triv…
The major problems are not really technical in nature. Homographs, Unicode madness (normalization etc..), and the biggest problem of all: input methods. It would be highly ironical if "international" "more global" email would lead to more nationalized islands because only local people can input those "international" email addresses. A single global character set (in the non-technical sense) is required for a system to be really global. You might argue that ASCII being that global set is eurocentric, but there isn't really any good alternatives available. Afaik pretty much every computer can input ASCII with relative ease no matter how exotic their users native script is.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#27What are the security implications? Does anyone know how canonicalization is handled? Does every mail program need to know how to precompose/decompose etc? How do you protect against impersonation using look-alike letters? This is, as far as I know, not yet a solved problem even at the domain name level[0], and it's likely to open a whole new can of worms at the account level. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_hom…
One small fix would be to mark non-latin characters in an email address.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#28Out of curiosity, how would I send an email to somebody who's address is in a language I can't type?
Re: A first step toward more global email
#29Does it mean Gmail now support creating non-latin email addresses for Google account? I tried creating one now (in US) and got: "Please use only letters (a-z), numbers, and periods."
Re: A first step toward more global email
#30Maybe this is a good thing but I wouldn't have an email address with accented characters (and my name contains two of them). It would be quite awkward if I gave someone my address and he/she couldn't simply type it with his/her default keyboard configuration.
Right, that's a legit concern. How about an app that quickly loads up all the language keyboards in the OS and lets you pop into one temporarily for the purposes of typing one thing in notepad or just straight into the clipboard?