INTERNATIONAL EMAIL ADDRESSING:

UTF DO WE KNOW?

Most non-English users would prefer to use their own language and alphabet in email addresses.

Until now, technical limitations confined email addresses to Latin alphabet characters, plus a range of allowed symbols.

With the advent of IDN domain names email addressing has lagged behind in language flexibility.

Gmail has now been upgraded to accept the extended UTF8 character set in addresses, which includes č, š and ž.

But that’s only the beginning of a new start. Research into this UTF8 upgrade path has been going on since at least 1996!

We suspect the slow progress results more from Anglo-hegemony and human inertia than any particularly challenging technical problem. Communication across language barriers is vital for European business and not least for the Slovenian tourism industry.

There is a problem in that all the mail transfer servers in a route must support the advanced set.

But for receiving mail via direct delivery the only obstacles are lack of UTF8 support on users’ email clients and on the outgoing and incoming mail gateways.

With the Gmail change, the first of these barriers has been removed for its 425 million active users worldwide. The Gmail mobile app has a 29% annual user growth.

@ptuj international emails are intended as advertising tools, for forwarding only, to existing standard email addresses.

Their purpose is to enhance market presence by use of familiar terms in a spread of languages, offering advertisers ready-made user-friendly email addresses that can be used to route inbound enquiries to your existing address, from where outgoing mail will continue to be handled.

Like most, the email forwarding system of the domain registrar for www.ptuj.co.uk is unable to forward or receive mail containing UTF8 addresses. There are several ways this could be resolved.

Discussions have taken place and the situation is live. Various methods of dealing with internationalised-address mail are under consideration.

It is anticipated that internationalised mail @ptuj will become a reality at some point in the not-too-distant future.

For the time being Latin-based multi-language addresses will be able to forward email to your recipient address.

Latin characters are enough for the majority of the addresses in most suites.

You can test create a suite of addresses to see how you could be understood internationally with this tool...

Create a personalised international email forwarding suite for your activity

Latin character approximations of near-Latin characters already work, of course. We offer as much flexibility as possible when designing each @ptuj email suite, which consists of 30 addresses, so that this is one way in which unused slots can be utilised.

The @ptuj suites interpret to a target audience in excess of one billion, and include both Latin-based and non-Latin-based addresses. You can see the source for all topic directory entries on Sheet 4.

Surprising quantum leaps are the norm in communications technology. In email addressing the UTF8 set may appear in common usage sooner than perhaps seems likely today. @ptuj Latin addresses are a good investment right now. @ptuj non-Latin addresses should be regarded as an investment over time.