A first step toward more global email
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A first step toward more global email
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Re: A first step toward more global email
#2Quick question; when characters appears as blocks on my screen, they can still be copy-pasted, right? I would imagine so since the required font is missing but the data, which is the important part, is still available.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#3Interesting.
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?
Re: A first step toward more global email
#4This is very useful for non native english speakers that uses other than latin characters.
I have to repeat word by word and check what people wrote when I need to tell my email address.
If my address was a word in hebrew, or something people can pronounce and write it would actually help, saving time and avoiding misspellings.
But this should be an alias, or it should be very easy to create one, I already have my email for some years, I don't want to create a new one and handle two accounts unnecessarily.
Also lets say someone creates his email address in his native language, so it is easier to give his address to his friends at school, later in life he wants to give his address to a VC from US he met. even if he gives a business card with his email printed in clear letters, this western person can't even spell or even type, unless he could copy/paste the address he won't be able to send him an email.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#5Interesting. 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, mailing lists etc, will take much longer. But people may not mind having two email addresses if they can put one on their business card.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#6I 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.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#7Maybe 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.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#8I 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.
The web is currently broken for not supporting stuff like that. I imagine over half of the world population can't write their name in ASCII only characters, that's pretty inexcusable. Internationalization is here to stay, it's our job as software engineers to support it everywhere.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#9I 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.
The web is currently broken for not supporting stuff like that. I imagine over half of the world population can't write their name in ASCII only characters, that's pretty inexcusable. Internationalization is here to stay, it's our job as software engineers to support it everywhere.
Your argument would be a lot more useful and falsifiable if you put it in cost-benefit terms. I'm not so convinced that having a few billion people use ASCII approximations is "inexcusable", but at least if you said "the worldwide benefits are worth the implementation costs" that could be wrong or right.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#10What 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.