What are the security implications?<p>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?<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack</a>
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.<p>If my address was a word in hebrew, or something people can pronounce and write it would actually help, saving time and avoiding misspellings.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
For people who are wondering, the example Japanese email address translates to "takeshi@mail.google" (Takeshi is a male, Japanese first name).
I just tried to create a gmail account with non-latin characters and received this message from Google:<p><pre><code> Please use only letters (a-z), numbers, and periods.
</code></pre>
EDIT: I guess I missed this crucial sentence<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
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.<p>Heck my name is ascii compatible but it isn't available.
Interesting.<p>Question: What do you guys think it'd take to get the other N% of email providers, clients, servers, and whatnot onboard?<p>Is this an ipV6-like situation?
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."