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A first step toward more global email

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Re: A first step toward more global email

#41

Post by thaumasiotes »

ifette wrote: post #19
tomjen3 wrote: post #6

I 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.

A lot of cases of "accented characters" are much simpler, compared to e.g. Chinese or Japanese, where the mapping is not 1-1 (a given kanji could have multiple readings, or for Chinese, pinyin is not 1-1). There's also a number of people who don't know the ASCII mapping for their language. Chinese can be written with bopomofo or 5-stroke input, for example. There are programs for input of indic languages that use vis…

Well, internationalized usernames are "available" on weibo in the sense that your displayed "name" can be anything you want. But you don't log in with your displayed name; it's an arbitrary bit of account data, and is changeable whenever you want. You log in with an email address, which is how the system identifies you.

(checking now just to make sure, I see that weibo allows three options for logging in: an email address (not internationalized), an account number (not internationalized), and a phone number (not internationalized))

Re: A first step toward more global email

#42

Post by hadoukenio »

mike_hearn wrote: post #5
staticfish wrote: post #3

Interesting. 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…

> Almost all email moves between only a handful of companies. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple

That's pretty naive. You need to step outside your comfy bubble.

Out of all the small businesses on the internet, how many of them are still running an email server under someone's desk?

And not to mention, what about all the client-side javascript out there that parses email addresses on web forms? Think about all those throw-away regexes to parse email forms on websites. I've seen a lot of them break just on these new TLDs - and they are ASCII!

Re: A first step toward more global email

#43

Post by devindotcom »

hadoukenio wrote: post #40
devindotcom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How about an app that quickly loads up all the language That sounds convenient. /s

Not all at once... just retrieves them for searching and really quick usage. launch the app, type in "m....a....n.." and hit the mandarin option. Your new Chinese friend types in his email address and you pop it into a contact. No settings need to be changed or anything. Is that really such a weird idea?

Re: A first step toward more global email

#44

Post by gingerlime »

I just tried to create a gmail account with non-latin characters and received this message from Google:

    Please use only letters (a-z), numbers, and periods.
EDIT: I guess I missed this crucial sentence

    Of course, this is just a first step and there’s still a ways to go. In the future, we want to make it possible for you to use them to create Gmail accounts.

Re: A first step toward more global email

#45

Post by hadoukenio »

devindotcom wrote: post #43
hadoukenio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about an app that quickly loads up all the language That sounds convenient. /s

Not all at once... just retrieves them for searching and really quick usage. launch the app, type in "m....a....n.." and hit the mandarin option. Your new Chinese friend types in his email address and you pop it into a contact. No settings need to be changed or anything. Is that really such a weird idea?

> Not all at once... just retrieves them for searching and really quick usage. launch the app, type in "m....a....n.." and hit the mandarin option

And now you have two problems. Why would you be searching for mandarin which is the anglicised-ASCII translation for Guānhuà. More correctly, you should be searching for ㄍㄨㄢ ㄏㄨㄚ.

Re: A first step toward more global email

#46

Post by devindotcom »

hadoukenio wrote: post #45
devindotcom wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all at once... just retrieves them for searching and really quick usage. launch the app, type in "m....a....n.." and hit the mandarin option. Your new Chinese friend types in his email address and you pop it into a contact. No settings need to be changed or anything. Is that really such a weird idea?

> Not all at once... just retrieves them for searching and really quick usage. launch the app, type in "m....a....n.." and hit the mandarin option And now you have two problems. Why would you be searching for mandarin which is the anglicised-ASCII translation for Guānhuà. More correctly, you should be searching for ㄍㄨㄢ ㄏㄨㄚ.

One would assume that if the OS is set to English, the keyboard options will be listed in English, and if the OS is set to ㄍㄨㄢ ㄏㄨㄚ, the keyboard options will be listed in ㄍㄨㄢ ㄏㄨㄚ. This isn't a problem at all if you know the name in your own language for the language you are seeking.

Re: A first step toward more global email

#47

Post by bane »

ihuman wrote: post #36
bane wrote: post #28

Out of curiosity, how would I send an email to somebody who's address is in a language I can't type?

In addition to copying the address, you can also use a virtual keyboard to map your existing keyboard to the keyboard of another language. I know that OS X has this built in, and I am assuming Windows does too.

I have a business card and the email address is in a language I don't know how to type (having a virtual keyboard doesn't mean I know how to reproduce the actual characters, which is true for many languages).

Or worse, somebody is trying to give me their address over the phone.

Here's an example: Try to figure out how to type:

宮本茂@任天堂株式会社.com

Here's another I'm pretty certain I can't figure out with a virtual keyboard.

প্রিয়াংশু.চ্যাটার্জী@बॉलीवुड.com

How about mixed languages? Like the case of a foreign worker assigned to another foreign department in yet a third country.

김기덕@बॉलीवुड.ประเทศไทย.com

I'm not going to tell you what languages these are in. Just pretend you were handed these on business cards or saw them on a slide deck at a conference and can't get a digital copy. Let me know how it goes.

Re: A first step toward more global email

#48

Post by pornel »

mfringel wrote: post #27
beagle3 wrote: post #10

What 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.

I have a "non-latin" letter in my surname, and I find highlighting it as somehow wrong or suspicious offensive.

Re: A first step toward more global email

#49

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #41
ifette wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of cases of "accented characters" are much simpler, compared to e.g. Chinese or Japanese, where the mapping is not 1-1 (a given kanji could have multiple readings, or for Chinese, pinyin is not 1-1). There's also a number of people who don't know the ASCII mapping for their language. Chinese can be written with bopomofo or 5-stroke input, for example. There are programs for input of indic languages that use vis…

Well, internationalized usernames are "available" on weibo in the sense that your displayed "name" can be anything you want. But you don't log in with your displayed name; it's an arbitrary bit of account data, and is changeable whenever you want. You log in with an email address, which is how the system identifies you. (checking now just to make sure, I see that weibo allows three options for logging in: an email ad…

I admit I don't understand the downvote. Email already has internationalization in the same sense as weibo does. You might receive email from me as 'From: Michael Watts '; the email address doesn't support arbitrary characters, but the name does (I've received email from '"=?gb18030?B?w8DIy7nY?=" ', which worked out to a displayed name of 美人关). Similarly, if I wanted to display 美人关 as my handle on weibo, I could do that, but I wouldn't be able to use it to identify my account.
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