IDN and Email The Harsh Reality
Posted by Dooot Domain News, Nov 22 2009
DNS News - >>

Source: www.circleid.com

There has been a lot of talk about IDNs here and elsewhere but what does the reality look like for a plain user?

As a test, I randomly choose 28 domains from Alexa\'s top 100 Sites and tried to create a user account with the email address user@??.com.

The bleak result: only wikipedia.org accepted the IDN - and later on failed to send a verification ping - all other rejected the email address.

IDN domains have standardized since March 2003 (RFC 3490) but as far as I know only one major email provider actually supports IDNs flawlessly…

The tested domains in alphabetic order were: adobe.com, amazon.com, bing.com, blogger.com, cnet.com, cnn.com, conduit.com, craigslist.org, dailymotion.com, deviantart.com, ebay.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, imageshack.us, imdb.com, linkedin.com, live.com, livejournal.com, mediafire.com, megaupload.com, mininova.org, myspace.com, nytimes.com, photobucket.com, twitter.com, wikipedia.org, wordpress.com, youtube.com

Written by Th. Kühne