Gmail gains support for non-ASCII email addresses Google has decided to give a two-year-old IETF e-mail standard a push towards universal adoption, by switching on support for RFC 6530 international character support in Gmail. The RFC was crafted to allow people “to use close variations on their own names (written correctly in their own languages and scripts) as mailbox names …
Trick question. You can't. Neither can the google, but working together it would be possible to get much closer. For example, you can report that you never requested a subscription in the first place, and google can test unsubscribe mechanisms with honeypot addresses. Together you can check if you issued an unsubscribe request in the past and see that it is not being honored.
This is actually important to distinguish some legitimate mail lists from spammers, but it isn't trivial.
The real problem, of course, is that the google has become too EVIL to care. Have you ever seen their miserable and execrable excuse for a spam-reporting form? Not worth your search if you haven't.
If the google wasn't so EVIL, then they would offer some really effective anti-spammer tools that would allow us to help destroy the spammers' business models. Less money = less spam. You don't have to be a good Samaritan, but I think there are plenty of people like me who would be glad of the opportunity to help disrupt ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and help ALL of the spammers' victims.
Well, actually I don't really care about the corporate victims or the fools who just need to be protected from themselves. My own concern is mostly with the innocent victims such as children who think they are getting a new game to play while they pwn their phones or computers. You'd be hard pressed to convince me there are more despicable bastards out there.
But the google don't care. EVIL.
The google could not possibly care less. I suppose the real question is how the google profits from the spammers. I just can't believe their also stupid enough to provide so much support for spammers without getting their beak wet. EVIL.
And when your name is, for example Евгения Басова and you don't speak English and you don't know non-Cyrillic alphabets and you use a Cyrillic keyboard, being forced to use an "English" name makes you feel like a second class citizen.
The world doesn't just speak one language, so why should internet users be forced to? Even Western countries with extended alphabets have had to put up with this, because "back in the day", we were limited to 8-bit computers and ASCII. We moved to Unicode 2 decades ago, why hasn't the Internet caught up?
> ...and you don't speak English and you don't know non-Cyrillic alphabets and you use a Cyrillic keyboard...
i.e. any advanced use of computers is out of question for you, well, then you just use a contact list in your communication app. The little things with @s in them are not that important. They are some internal handles for computer geeks. You probably use social sites, not e-mail, to communicate anyway.
And if you have to you can still copy'n'paste an e-mail address when you see it even though you cannot type it. Which is excatly the situation *everyone* will be in soon.
Dealing with a lot of Eastern block companies, the number of employees who speak English is limited, but they still have to communicate internally and with other non-English speaking companies.
I live in Germany and most people here have gotten used to the fact that they can't use their real name in email addresses and they have to use an Anglised version of their name if they want to communicate, even when both parties speak German. I guess most other western countries are the same. But I would find it annoying, if my name was Jörg Weißmüller, but online I had to call myself Joerg Weissmueller.
Why should the majority suffer from not being able to use their names, because the few can't be bothered to let them, because it is easier for them?
I'm sure if you had to learn to type you name and the recipients name in Cyrillic or Chinese, so that you could email somebody else in England, you would want to be able to use a system that understood English. Why is it so hard to think that the other way round is any different?
The world does have a single main language, and that language is English, in the same way that Latin was the Lingua Franca for a millenium or more. If a Chinese person wishes to speak to a Ghanaian and they don't speak each other's language, they will probably use English.
That's not to say that email shouldn't support non-ASCII email addresses. I'm not convinced of the benefit since anything that brings us closer to using a single global language (and therefore understanding each other better) must be a good thing. But I don't see why there shouldn't be the option to use forn.
brings us closer to using a single global language (and therefore understanding each other better) must be a good thing.
I disagree. A single language won't necessarily help either with better understanding, or bringing people together. Some languages are better than others at expressing certain concepts, which is why art and culture are so often tied to language.
To take a trivial example, when people use the term "free software" they always have to clarify whether that's free as in "free beer", or as in "unconstrained". That's a confusion which can't happen in French and other latin-based languages.
What brings people together is an interest in, and appreciation of, our differences. Homogenizing language, like homogenizing society, won't bring people together. If anything it drives them apart as people look for other ways to be different.
Sigh. The first of a series of well-meant but ill-informed replies, and some very dumb down-votes. I don't mind an honest down-vote when I'm wrong, or juist when someone disagrees, but these are daft. The arrogance of some people is extraordinary in missing two obvious and vital points.
(1) The post you downvoted and/or criticised was expressing a willingness to comply with these new requirements, and indeed support for them. Read the post before replying, huh? Or is that too hard?
(2) Some developers and publishers know who their their target audience is and know who visits their sites. For example, of the 20-odd sites I do the code for, I can think of one - just one - where I can even imagine a non-English speaking person wanting to participate, and even there it's marginally useful 'coz all else aside, the query would have to be written in the native language of the staff member responding to it - i.e., English. (Who could read it otherwise?) But (sigh) I'll doubtless code up the changes for it anyway, though not as any sort of priority, and might as well port that new code to the other sites too.
Out in the real world, vast numbers of Internet sites and Internet-present organisations are locally based, concerned with local people and local issues, and are neither interested in nor interesting to people outside a small geographical area. It is a crazy arrogance to claim that you know how to do someone's job better than they do when you don't even know what that job is - but sadly, far too common a thing in Geekville.It is, in fact, exactly the same ignorant arrogance you think you are complaining about only in reverse. It is just as daft to insist on adding useless cross-language features and complexity to a product which will only ever be used with one single language in one single place with one single character set as it is to refuse to add those features to a multi-country product which will be used by many different people with many different languages and character sets.
</rant>
PS: sorry about the rant, but those posts were so dumb they got right up my nose.
some bugger will start using an "illegal" email address that is not illegal anymore and it will be rejected by my code
So stop making assumptions about what's "legal". Are you one of those website developers that rejects "+" signs in phone numbers, or insists that addresses must have a "State" value?
Remember the Postel doctrine as stated in RFC1122 ("Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers"): Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
...or insists that addresses must have a "State" value?
That is one thing that really gets to me. The closest thing we ever had in New Zealand were the provinces, which were abolished in 1876. Despite this, just recently trying to get something sent out from overseas I was told that it was mandatory to insert a state/province. To (apparently) make it easier, this was to be picked from a drop down list of three letter abbreviations, none of which I or anyone in the room had ever seen before. Even with a list of the provinces there were some which we couldn't identify.
</rant>
i.e. something that looks like a lowercase 'a' but actually has a different code? I see lots of opportunity for spammers to confuse and find yet more ways around spam filters.
I think most in the US would do better if we could set our spam filters to mark as spam any email using non-ASCII email addresses, because you could just about guarantee it will be spam. As it is, every few weeks I get a spam in Arabic. Does Pakistan have the equivalent of 419ers and Viagra sales? Who knows...
It's not just spammers that will abuse this. I've seen a security exploit where a system processed multibyte characters as if they were single-byte ones. It could be used to sneak escape characters like "%" or "?" into URLs or SQL code, which can bypass sanitizing routines.
PS. Pakistanis speak Punjabi, not Arabic
Errr...no they don't
From the CIA World factbook:
Punjabi 48%, Sindhi 12%, Saraiki (a Punjabi variant) 10%, Pashto (alternate name, Pashtu) 8%, Urdu (official) 8%, Balochi 3%, Hindko 2%, Brahui 1%, English (official; lingua franca of Pakistani elite and most government ministries), Burushaski, and other 8%
Even Wikipedia agrees:
Punjabi is the most common spoken language in Pakistan, with the fact that 70.0% of the people of Pakistan speak Punjabi as either their first or second language
Not sure which version of Wikipedia you got your information form, but when I looked (now) it says
"Urdu, the lingua franca and a symbol of Muslim identity and national unity, is the national language and is understood by over 75% of Pakistanis"
all it says about Punjabi is
"Punjabi is the most common native language in Punjab and has many native speakers"
I wouldn't trust the CIA to tell me the time.
Not sure which version of Wikipedia you got your information form
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Pakistan
Punjabi is spoken as a first language by more than 44% of Pakistanis ... there are many dialects ... If both included then 60% population speaks Punjabi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_languages_of_Pakistan
Punjabi is the most common spoken language in Pakistan, with the fact that 70.0% of the people of Pakistan speak Punjabi as either their first or second language and for some as their third language.
I wouldn't trust the CIA to tell me the time.
Your loss.
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