André, thanks for the info! I'm working up the courage to register for a service whose prices are denominated in rupees. One more question: does the DataMail offering require that you use a web client, or does it support POP/IMAP so you can use a desktop or phone client?
Anyway, the latest EAI developments are pretty interesting, if you read the tea leaves.
First, there was the announcement of the Indian government's initiative to give all government employees EAI addresses (unicode on both sides of the "@" sign). (
http://www.idnforums.com/forums/3563...nitiative.html ) Then Microsoft's announcement of EAI support in Outlook (above in this thread).
Here is another Microsoft announcement:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/msi...languages-eai/
Although it focuses on support for Indian languages, here is the most important quote:
Quote:
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Not only can our products send and receive emails from local language email addresses, users can also use IMAP and SMTP protocols to sync with mail servers and set these email addresses as their default addresses in Outlook. This end-to-end integration closes the loop of a user’s online experience with local languages so that a user can interact with the web without the need to know English. This level of integration is unique to Microsoft’s products.
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This goes beyond Google's EAI support (which lets you receive EAI email, but not register your own EAI address), and the support previously available on Microsoft's outlook.com.
As far as I can tell, the only way to get this end-to-end EAI experience on your own IDN domain is to pay Microsoft $12.50 per user per month (
https://products.office.com/en-us/ex...e-online-plans ), which is rather steep.
The big picture: Large government entities in India are creating a demand for EAI email implementations. Microsoft is the first to provide a full EAI implementation suitable for business and government (including SMTP server, IMAP/POP server, and desktop client), at a pretty steep price. Hopefully, this will encourage others who are currently letting their offerings stagnate: Fastmail, for instance, is currently a bit asleep (
https://github.com/cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd/issues/1647 ), and as far as I can tell, Google has not done anything since its initial work in 2014.
Here, by the way, is an EAI update from 2017:
http://meeting.cctld.ru/docs/lidin.pdf which shows that the open-source solutions are starting to catch up; we just need someone less expensive than Microsoft to polish them up, combine them, and provide full EAI support.
Will this lead to a revival of IDNs? Who knows? Users all over the world seem to prefer using ascii, rather than their own scripts, to communicate with computers, for reasons I don't understand.
But we can hope.
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