Chinese Email Success

[andre]

Yesterday I successfully sent an email from my DataMail 小山@电邮.在线 to my Coremail 小山@互联网.网络 and vice versa :)

André 小山 Schappo

[techguy]

IDN market is almost non-existent. In this situation, it doesn't matter whether IDN emails are working or not :D

[Kent99]

Congrats! Is this a new development or has it been working for awhile? Can I send an email from my Outlook account to you? I guess I could try it myself.

[Kent99]

Sent you a test email to 小山@电邮.在线 from my Outlook account.

[andre]

Sent you a test email to 小山@电邮.在线 from my Outlook account.

I have received your email and have replied :)

I have had my DataMail Chinese email since Jan 6th 2017. I have had my Coremail Chinese email for about 4 weeks.

The current situation with EAI (Email Address Internationalisation) addresses is that inter mail server communication is in itʼs early stages so one has to try it out on a server by server basis. But it is changing rapidly. There are many organisations now working on supporting EAI email. I expect by the end of this year to see many more mail servers supporting EAI.

If you want your own EAI address, DataMail offer free email addresses in any one of 14 different languages https://mail.datamail.in/

André 小山 Schappo

[Kent99]

I received your reply message but it went into my junk email folder.

[andre]

In February Microsoft announced support for EAI in Exchange Online and outlook

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2018/02/26/eai-support-announcement-update/

André 小山 Schappo

[mgrohan]

In February Microsoft announced support for EAI in Exchange Online and outlook

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2018/02/26/eai-support-announcement-update/

André 小山 Schappo


Exciting stuff

[Avtal]

André,

Do any of these services allow you to bring your own IDN domain? Or do you have to use one of theirs?

Avtal

[andre]

André,

Do any of these services allow you to bring your own IDN domain? Or do you have to use one of theirs?

Avtal

That is a question I have not thought to ask. I have just emailed DataMail asking them.

It is early days for EAI so I think probably not yet. Gmail and MS support EAI but do not yet allow a user to register an EAI mailbox. The only 2 non-experimental email services that I know of that allow user registration of EAI addresses are DataMail and Coremail. Coremail has a fixed Chinese IDN and DataMail has a choice of 13 IDNs (14 including ASCII).

There may well, by now, be other email services which support EAI but do not yet allow user registration of EAI addresses.

If anyone discovers other email services which now support EAI or support EAI and allow user registration of EAI addresses please do let us know.

André Schappo

[andre]

That is a question I have not thought to ask. I have just emailed DataMail asking them.

It is early days for EAI so I think probably not yet. Gmail and MS support EAI but do not yet allow a user to register an EAI mailbox. The only 2 non-experimental email services that I know of that allow user registration of EAI addresses are DataMail and Coremail. Coremail has a fixed Chinese IDN and DataMail has a choice of 13 IDNs (14 including ASCII).

There may well, by now, be other email services which support EAI but do not yet allow user registration of EAI addresses.

If anyone discovers other email services which now support EAI or support EAI and allow user registration of EAI addresses please do let us know.

André Schappo

OK. I was wrong. I have had a response from DataMail and you can bring your own IDN. They offer Cloud Email Hosting which is a paid service. See https://www.xgenplus.com/buy/

André Schappo

[Avtal]

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/35632-indian-government-hindi-email-initiative.html ) Then Microsoft's announcement of EAI support in Outlook (above in this thread).

Here is another Microsoft announcement:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/msind/2018/02/21/enabling-email-addresses-indian-languages-eai/

Although it focuses on support for Indian languages, here is the most important quote:

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.

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/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-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.

Avtal

[Avtal]

Correction to my previous message.

Microsoft is not as far along as I thought. I signed up for a free trial of their $12.50 a month plan, thinking that I could let their Exchange-Online product host my full-unicode email address. But that didn't work; I eventually found this quote hidden in a blog ( https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2017/12/27/eai-support-announcement/ )

But please note that this new release will not support adding EAI addresses for Office 365 users, or IDN domains for Office 365 organizations. We will continue to evaluate these features as the standards are more widely adopted. We will also keep you posted on the plan to release this to Exchange Enterprise version.

So it is the same old story: Microsoft products (including cloud products) will let you send email to, and receive email from, EAI addresses, but they can't host EAI addresses themselves. Time to look deeper into DataMail / XGenPlus.

I'm glad it was a free trial.

Avtal

[andre]

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?

Avtal

I have just looked at XGenPlus FAQs https://www.xgenplus.com/f-a-q-s/

Q: Can I configure XGenPlus on Outlook Express or other mail clients?
A: YES, XGenPlus supports POP/IMAP on Outlook Express and other mail clients. Learn to configure now.

With my free DataMail (which is XGenPlus) Chinese email I can use it with a Mobile App or with a browser as webmail. I choose to use it via webmail.

André 小山 Schappo

[squirrel]

very interesting thread gentlemen

[andre]

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.
Avtal

My attention was grabbed by slide 12. I followed the link on that slide. If you look at https://statdom.ru/tld/рф/report/mxsmtputf8/#52 you will see there is a steady year on year growth of servers in the рф domain supporting SMTPUTF8 which is a crucial component for EAI.

If, like me, you cannot read Russian, you can select English, top right.

André 小山 Schappo

[andre]

My attention was grabbed by slide 12. I followed the link on that slide. If you look at https://statdom.ru/tld/рф/report/mxsmtputf8/#52 you will see there is a steady year on year growth of servers in the рф domain supporting SMTPUTF8 which is a crucial component for EAI.

If, like me, you cannot read Russian, you can select English, top right.

André 小山 Schappo

Correction. I did not read the tables carefully enough.

March 2018: 238 servers with SMTPUTF8
September 2016: 83 servers with SMTPUTF8

So the overall trend is upwards but there was a peak in May 2017 when there was 255 servers with SMTPUTF8

André Schappo

[andre]

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.
Avtal

On the last slide is a Russian email address. Yesterday I emailed it from one of my Chinese emails. Today I received a reply:)

André 小山 Schappo

[andre]

I happened upon this enterprising individual twitter.com/markpanado/status/992440041677799424 (https://twitter.com/markpanado/status/992440041677799424)

He is using google as the email handler.

Anyone else setup their IDN for email?

André Schappo