7 ms·

A first step toward more global email

55 points by aseidl 12y ago

xtrumanx 12y ago
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.
- sucramb 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    That's not relevant at all to that person's question. Did you link the right thing? That is the generic password "joke."
- Someone1234 12y ago
  The unfortunate answer is "it depends." There's three reasons why text might appear blocked out: corrupt data (we'll ignore this), data in formats the text renderer doesn't "understand," and data in formats it DOES understand but doesn't have the prerequisite fonts to draw. Typically when it is a lack-of-fonts issue you can copy it back out and paste it elsewhere and it will work fine as the data's consistency is kept. But when the text renderer literally doesn't understand the underlying data (either because it is misconfigured or doesn't fully support UNICODE), when you try to copy back out you'll often get a corrupted version of the underlying data which cannot be reused (e.g. a 2 byte character treated as two 1 byte characters). That issue is less and less common in 2014, as MOST text renderers support 2 byte UNICODE characters even if they won't have the fonts to render the full sets. But around the year 2000, it was fairly common to run across a text editor which under-the-hood was just ASCII and it would corrupt irrecoverably UNICODE inputed.
staticfish 12y ago
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?
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  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.
  - jimktrains2 12y ago
    While we're at it, can we simplify the grammar of an email address? Does anyone really embed comments in their address?
  - nawitus 12y ago
    After a quick glance at the standard, I belive email providers like Google who support SMTPUTF8 could support having two email addresses transparently to the user. According to the standard: "If the message cannot be forwarded because the next-hop system cannot accept the extension, it MUST be rejected or a non-delivery message MUST be generated and sent." Google could preserve a backup ASCII email for all UTF-8 email addresses, which would be used in the case the recipient doesn't support SMTPUTF8. Of course, I don't know if Google has plans to support this.
  - Steuard 12y ago
    This comment is pretty frightening to me. Email is very often used for "mission critical" purposes, not just for exchanging messages with other users (let alone just "with other users of the top 5 providers"). I know that enabling international characters is important for a whole range of reasons, and that's worth some significant costs. But email infrastructure is emphatically not something where "works most of the time" or even "works 95% of the time" is good enough. I think there really is a need for pretty substantial attention to backward compatibility in this case.
tovmeod 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.)
tomjen3 12y ago
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.
- krschultz 12y ago
  The web is currently broken for not supporting stuff like that. I imagine over half of the world population can't write their name in ASCII only characters, that's pretty inexcusable. Internationalization is here to stay, it's our job as software engineers to support it everywhere.
  - jessriedel 12y ago
    Your argument would be a lot more useful and falsifiable if you put it in cost-benefit terms. I'm not so convinced that having a few billion people use ASCII approximations is "inexcusable", but at least if you said "the worldwide benefits are worth the implementation costs" that could be wrong or right.
    - mikestew 12y ago
      His comment is plenty useful. We've had computers around long enough that one doesn't need to provide a cost-benefit analysis to justify saying "this is stupid". "Check this out, I've got a box that can play movies. It can immerse you in a 3D video environment that you can interact with. You can talk to people thousands of miles away for free. It allows you access to much of the world's knowledge. It can solve numeric problems that would take years to solve by hand." <a large portion of the world's population responds> "Yeah, that's neat and all. How come when I type my name all I see on the screen are squares?" Perhaps it doesn't qualify for the "inexcusable" tag, but it sure seems pretty broken. "It's always been that way" doesn't strike me as a very good resolution reason for the bug.
- nawitus 12y ago
leni536 12y ago
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.
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  QR codes to the rescue!
  - ori_b 12y ago
    Doesn't help if someone is dictating it to me.
    - VikingCoder 12y ago
      Um, there's a filled dot. Then an empty one. Then there's like three filled ones. No, four. Then another empty one...
- greggman 12y ago
  I agree with this. Also, many years ago when they started allowing unicode domain names several of my Japan friends thought Japan would switch over to unicode domain names. It's now been several years and I have yet to see a single Japanese website with a Japanese character domain name. (I'm sure someone will pull one up just now ;) The problem (one problem?) is legacy devices. At the time most phones and possibly even some browsers had limited input to URL fields in ascii only. The keyboard they'd show when you when to enter a URL didn't provide the input methods for non-ascii text. So, having a non-ascii domain would have only lost you customers. Or made it more confusing. As in do I go to mitsubishi.com or 三菱.com? (三菱.jp is registered but googling for site:三菱.jp brings up zero hits) I'm not saying I'm against non-ascii email names. I'm just suggesting it's not likely to change much anytime soon. Just a guess
- devindotcom 12y ago
  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?
beagle3 12y ago
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 12y ago
  One small fix would be to mark non-latin characters in an email address.
  - pornel 12y ago
    I have a "non-latin" letter in my surname, and I find highlighting it as somehow wrong or suspicious offensive.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  Something like hashing or petnames, maybe.
noorie 12y ago
I wonder how gmail will handle the type-ahead for addy's in diff languages. Especially since I only type in US English.
bluedino 12y ago
So, about those email validation regexes...
- fredley 12y ago
  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.
bane 12y ago
Out of curiosity, how would I send an email to somebody who's address is in a language I can't type?
- y0ghur7_xxx 12y ago
  Copy & Paste?
- ihuman 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
guruparan18 12y ago
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."
dharbin 12y ago
Does it support emoji?
- ihuman 12y ago
  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.
ihuman 12y ago
For people who are wondering, the example Japanese email address translates to "takeshi@mail.google" (Takeshi is a male, Japanese first name).
cordite 12y ago
Good luck typing in those characters, or even knowing how to pronounce them if you had a "sounds-like" index.
gingerlime 12y ago
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.

55 points by aseidl 12y ago

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.

sucramb 12y ago
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 12y ago
  That's not relevant at all to that person's question. Did you link the right thing? That is the generic password "joke."
Someone1234 12y ago
The unfortunate answer is "it depends." There's three reasons why text might appear blocked out: corrupt data (we'll ignore this), data in formats the text renderer doesn't "understand," and data in formats it DOES understand but doesn't have the prerequisite fonts to draw. Typically when it is a lack-of-fonts issue you can copy it back out and paste it elsewhere and it will work fine as the data's consistency is kept. But when the text renderer literally doesn't understand the underlying data (either because it is misconfigured or doesn't fully support UNICODE), when you try to copy back out you'll often get a corrupted version of the underlying data which cannot be reused (e.g. a 2 byte character treated as two 1 byte characters). That issue is less and less common in 2014, as MOST text renderers support 2 byte UNICODE characters even if they won't have the fonts to render the full sets. But around the year 2000, it was fairly common to run across a text editor which under-the-hood was just ASCII and it would corrupt irrecoverably UNICODE inputed.

staticfish 12y ago

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?

mike_hearn 12y ago
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.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  While we're at it, can we simplify the grammar of an email address? Does anyone really embed comments in their address?
- nawitus 12y ago
  After a quick glance at the standard, I belive email providers like Google who support SMTPUTF8 could support having two email addresses transparently to the user. According to the standard: "If the message cannot be forwarded because the next-hop system cannot accept the extension, it MUST be rejected or a non-delivery message MUST be generated and sent." Google could preserve a backup ASCII email for all UTF-8 email addresses, which would be used in the case the recipient doesn't support SMTPUTF8. Of course, I don't know if Google has plans to support this.
- Steuard 12y ago
  This comment is pretty frightening to me. Email is very often used for "mission critical" purposes, not just for exchanging messages with other users (let alone just "with other users of the top 5 providers"). I know that enabling international characters is important for a whole range of reasons, and that's worth some significant costs. But email infrastructure is emphatically not something where "works most of the time" or even "works 95% of the time" is good enough. I think there really is a need for pretty substantial attention to backward compatibility in this case.

tovmeod 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.)

tomjen3 12y ago

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.

krschultz 12y ago
The web is currently broken for not supporting stuff like that. I imagine over half of the world population can't write their name in ASCII only characters, that's pretty inexcusable. Internationalization is here to stay, it's our job as software engineers to support it everywhere.
- jessriedel 12y ago
  Your argument would be a lot more useful and falsifiable if you put it in cost-benefit terms. I'm not so convinced that having a few billion people use ASCII approximations is "inexcusable", but at least if you said "the worldwide benefits are worth the implementation costs" that could be wrong or right.
  - mikestew 12y ago
    His comment is plenty useful. We've had computers around long enough that one doesn't need to provide a cost-benefit analysis to justify saying "this is stupid". "Check this out, I've got a box that can play movies. It can immerse you in a 3D video environment that you can interact with. You can talk to people thousands of miles away for free. It allows you access to much of the world's knowledge. It can solve numeric problems that would take years to solve by hand." <a large portion of the world's population responds> "Yeah, that's neat and all. How come when I type my name all I see on the screen are squares?" Perhaps it doesn't qualify for the "inexcusable" tag, but it sure seems pretty broken. "It's always been that way" doesn't strike me as a very good resolution reason for the bug.
nawitus 12y ago

leni536 12y ago

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.

VikingCoder 12y ago
QR codes to the rescue!
- ori_b 12y ago
  Doesn't help if someone is dictating it to me.
  - VikingCoder 12y ago
    Um, there's a filled dot. Then an empty one. Then there's like three filled ones. No, four. Then another empty one...
greggman 12y ago
I agree with this. Also, many years ago when they started allowing unicode domain names several of my Japan friends thought Japan would switch over to unicode domain names. It's now been several years and I have yet to see a single Japanese website with a Japanese character domain name. (I'm sure someone will pull one up just now ;) The problem (one problem?) is legacy devices. At the time most phones and possibly even some browsers had limited input to URL fields in ascii only. The keyboard they'd show when you when to enter a URL didn't provide the input methods for non-ascii text. So, having a non-ascii domain would have only lost you customers. Or made it more confusing. As in do I go to mitsubishi.com or 三菱.com? (三菱.jp is registered but googling for site:三菱.jp brings up zero hits) I'm not saying I'm against non-ascii email names. I'm just suggesting it's not likely to change much anytime soon. Just a guess
devindotcom 12y ago
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?

beagle3 12y ago

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 12y ago
One small fix would be to mark non-latin characters in an email address.
- pornel 12y ago
  I have a "non-latin" letter in my surname, and I find highlighting it as somehow wrong or suspicious offensive.
dllthomas 12y ago
Something like hashing or petnames, maybe.

noorie 12y ago

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

bluedino 12y ago

So, about those email validation regexes...

fredley 12y ago
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.

bane 12y ago

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

y0ghur7_xxx 12y ago
Copy & Paste?
ihuman 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

guruparan18 12y ago

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."

dharbin 12y ago

Does it support emoji?

ihuman 12y ago
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.

ihuman 12y ago

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

cordite 12y ago

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

gingerlime 12y ago

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.