
A first step toward more global email - aseidl
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-more-global-email.html
======
beagle3
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_homograph_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack)

~~~
mfringel
One small fix would be to mark non-latin characters in an email address.

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

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tovmeod
This 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.

~~~
Steuard
Creating a second Gmail account and setting it up to forward to your primary
account is already a pretty straightforward procedure, so that probably won't
be much of a problem. (There _would_ presumably be a need for some user
education on how to do that, though. And I agree that it might be nice to have
a built-in "aliases" feature in Gmail, regardless of internationalization.)

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xtrumanx
Quick 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.

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sucramb
Fist of all, I am quite aware that funny remarks are frowned upon on HN and I
agree to this policy. That said, I think that
[http://www.bash.org/?244321](http://www.bash.org/?244321) is still the
correct and informative answer.

~~~
Someone1234
That's not relevant at all to that person's question. Did you link the right
thing? That is the generic password "joke."

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leni536
Maybe 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.

~~~
devindotcom
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?

~~~
hadoukenio
> How about an app that quickly loads up all the language

That sounds convenient.

/s

~~~
devindotcom
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?

~~~
hadoukenio
> 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.

~~~
devindotcom
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.

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ihuman
For people who are wondering, the example Japanese email address translates to
"takeshi@mail.google" (Takeshi is a male, Japanese first name).

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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.

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tomjen3
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.

~~~
ifette
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 visual keyboards.

Let's say the Internet had been invented in Japan instead of the US. How would
you feel if people told you that you had to write your name in katakana
everywhere? As another commenter mentioned, internationalization is here to
stay, and if we want to expand to the next few billion users it's even more
important. FWIW internationalized usernames are already available on a number
of non-email platforms (Weibo as a prime example). For email to remain
competitive, it's important to keep up in the internationalization space.

~~~
thaumasiotes
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))

~~~
thaumasiotes
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 <i.made.this.up@hotmail.com>'; the email
address doesn't support arbitrary characters, but the name does (I've received
email from '"=?gb18030?B?w8DIy7nY?=" <XXXXXXXXX@qq.com>', 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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staticfish
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?

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mike_hearn
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.

~~~
hadoukenio
> 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!

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

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ihuman
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.

~~~
bane
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.

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noorie
I wonder how gmail will handle the type-ahead for addy's in diff languages.
Especially since I only type in US English.

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cordite
Good luck typing in those characters, or even knowing how to pronounce them if
you had a "sounds-like" index.

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bluedino
So, about those email validation regexes...

~~~
fredley
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

[http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html](http://www.ex-
parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html).

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guruparan18
Does 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."

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dharbin
Does it support emoji?

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ihuman
If it supports all characters defined by the Unicode standard, then it should.
However, it wouldn't surprise me if Google blacklists the non-language symbols
(like the emoji, shapes, etc.) because it is not within the scope of their
goal. You can't read emoji like a word, so it wouldn't work well with the goal
of making email addresses readable.

