Upgrading people by EAI – Downgrading

The 7.5 billion population of the world embraces different cultures, geographies, religion and language. When it comes to internet, language becomes much more important as approximately 350* (source Wikipedia-English-Speaking-world) million people speaks English and most of internet building blocks are in English or lets say ASCII.

While recognizing this need of multi-lingual Internet and bridging the digital divide in between English and non-English population so that non-English population can be upgraded to exploit the power of Internet, ICANN along with passionate community individuals in 1996 starting talking about this and IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) took birth.

What is IDN ?

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Tamil, Hindi or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription. ???????.???? in Hindi , почта.рус in Cyrillic and 支持@电邮.在线 in Chinese are valid examples of Internalized Domain names.

IDN adoption started from year 2010 with ccTLDs in the Arabic alphabet for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India adopted IDN in 2014 with .???? (Hindi equivalent of India) and launched domain registration in 8 Indian languages.

What is Punycode ?:

Punycode is a way to represent Unicode within the limited character subset of ASCII used for Internet host names. Using Punycode, host names containing Unicode characters are transcoded to a subset of ASCII consisting of letters, digits, and hyphen (the Letter-Digit-Hyphen (LDH) subset, as it is called). So when a IDN domain gets configured in DNS system, the domain name is configured using punycode not in Unicode part of domain. To explain it better we can take an example of Hindi IDN ???????.???? and its punycode will be xn--11b3arz5ee0h.xn--h2brj9c . You can try hands on using https://eai.xgenplus.com to convert any Unicode to Punycode or Punycode to Unicode. This site can also be used by software developers as a testing and conversion tool for IDN's and EAI.

As we all know, domain names are primarily used for two critical applications, 1) Website and 2) Email. Email was very important part for better adoption of the IDNs hence EAI (Email Address Internalization) protocol was finalised. and in 2014 Google announced their gmail platform to be compatible with email address created on IDNs. Microsoft also announced there support for receiving email and sending email to an EAI address, where XgenPlus was also announced as partner, where we supported them to test there software and provided hosting to there IDN's.

What is EAI ?

EAI is the protocol that allows email addresses with IDNs in the domain part and/or Unicode (non-ASCII) characters in the Mailbox name to function within the traditional email environment. ??????@???????.???? is a valid example of valid email address in Hindi. More information about EAI can also be found on https://uasg.tech . The IETF conducts a technical and standards working group devoted to internationalization issues of email addresses, entitled Email Address Internationalization (EAI, also known as IMA, Internationalized Mail Address). IETC has produced RFC 6530, RFC 6531, RFC 6532, and RFC 6533, and continues to work on additional EAI-related RFCs. In general communication people also refer this as Internationalization (UTF8SMTP) extension to email servers.

Obviously, now its understood that RFCs were needed to be followed by email servers and email clients (MUA) to be able to start EAI and this would create a situation where EAI Compliant email servers and non-EAI compliant servers will co-exists in the email world. This created a challenge to deliver an EAI email to non-EAI compliant email server and this led to another innovation and protocol called Downgrading. So that both servers can communicate and exchange emails flawlessly.

What is Downgrading ?

Internationalization (UTF8SMTP) extension allows UTF-8 characters in SMTP envelope and mail header fields. To avoid rejecting internationalized Email messages when a server in the delivery path does not support the UTF8SMTP extension, some sort of converting mechanism is required. This is known as Downgrading mechanism for Email Address Internationalization.

So when EAI compliant tries to deliver an email containing Unicode envelope and recipient server do not announce UTF8SMTP support, the sender server MUST downgrade and change the envelope to punycode (contains only ASCII characters) so that email gets delivered without any problem. However reciepient will not be able to display original Unicode characters. For Example email address in Hindi ???@????.???? could have been automatically downgraded to [email protected] if an email is being delivered to non-eai compliant email server, however this will confuse the recipient and may be considered as garbage. UASG group adopted the mechanism as best practice which was demonstrated by me in Guangzhou, China during the meeting.

The recommended practice for downgrading is quite innovative and recommends to replace the Punycode to a normal ASCII email address so that recipient can understand the sender very well and do not get confused by seeing punycodes. This is very well implemented in DATAMAIL app, you can try by downloading app, create email address in your preferred language and try sending an email to your own domain account (most likely it will not be supporting EAI, if not hosted by Gmail or Microsoft or XgenPlus or some compatible email server)

Upgrading People: (Bridging the digital divide)

In the times to come, our large global population will have access to internet as we all do today. People who are deprived because of language barrier, will enjoy the power of internet without any further laminations. We can imagine that IDN+EAI+Downgrading are going to create massive impact on the entire internet infrastructure, its adoption at mass scale and impacting billions of people life positively.

About ICANN:

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation and a community with participants from all over the world. ICANN and its community help keep the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It also promotes competition and develops policy for the top-level of the Internet's naming system and facilitates the use of other unique Internet identifiers.

About Author: Dr. Ajay Data is founder & CEO of Data Xgen Technologies, which is innovating and pioneering in the field of Email Address Internationlization solutions. He is also EAI Cordinator of uasg.tech and also ccNSO Council member in ICANN.