Chinese E-Mailadresses

[jsto_wd]

Hello,

I would like to know if anyone has experience with Chinese E-Mail Adresses.

I found plenty of material considering Internationlized Chinese Doman names, but concerning E-Mail adresses I did not find much (only A RFC from 1986 saying you cant use special characters in E-Mailadresses).

Can anyone tell me if they have ever seen a chinese E-Mailaddress in use?

Thanks!

[Hero Doug]

I've never seen anything besides roman numerials in any URL or Email address. Unicode, or other encoding's as far as I know haven't made it past being transmitted for text display purposes.

[imron]

The characters that can be used in email addresses and domain names are limited to a subset of ASCII. This limitation is built into the actual standards that define what a domain name/email address is, as they explicitly limit the range of characters that can be used. These standards were written before the internet was all that "internationally aware", and can be seen in some respects as a lack of foresight, as they prevent not only things like Chinese characters from being used, but also many extended ASCII characters like ü, ä, ö etc.

There is a standard that allows international characters to be used, however it does so by converting the the non-ASCII characters into an ASCII based string using the Punycode encoding. This is an application-level standard, which means that the backend of things still only allows for ASCII characters, it's just that now there is a standard that tells applications that if they want to, an ASCII string encoded in a certain way should be converted to unicode characters.

So, for example, if you are using a recent web-browser you can type in http://www.宜家.com (IKEA's webpage) and your browser will convert that to the relevant punycode string, and you will actually end up at http://www.xn--obt4b.com (xn--obt4b is the punycode-encoded version of 宜家). The application should hide all of this from the user, however there are still places where you might end up seeing the punycode string, rather than the correct internationalised version, especially when there is a risk of domain name spoofing by intermixing characters from one character set that look similar to characters from another character set.

This standard was only recently adopted, and so it's currently not in common use. In fact, a quick test shows that punycode-encoded domain names for many common chinese words/phrases are up for grabs (and a good many more look to have been snapped up by the same cybersquatter).

What all of this means is that Chinese people don't use chinese characters in their email addresses. Instead, it's quite common for many Chinese people just to use the initial pinyin letters of their name, or the full pinyin of their name and then a random string of numbers (possibly including their birthdate - which unfortunately from a security point of view they also use as their password). Those that speak English might use an English name or some other English word that they like.

[Hero Doug]

Hmm, I haven't heard of this standard yet, but I honestly don't like it. That kind of change really need's to happen at the core level, problem is they can't just shut down the internet for a day to update it. (Well they could, but wont).

I tried that link but it wouldn't work, do you have another I can try?

[imron]

Well, you might not like it, but it's here to stay. For the record, I don't particularly like it either, but it's not just a matter of turning off the internet for a day. Many applications/webpages also rely on the fact that email addresses/domain names can only contain certain characters, and for security reasons will disallow input (i.e. on web forms and the like) of anything that uses non-ASCII characters. Basically it came down to "break a whole lot of existing applications/websites" or "use this krufty hack", and in true internet fashion, they went with the krufty hack

When you say the link doesn't work, which link do you mean, and which browser are you using? Does it work if you just click on the punycoded link (the one starting with xn--).

If you're using the latest version of any of the major browsers, both the punycode link, and the link with chinese characters should work fine - in fact these are the same link (just represented in different encodings), so if one works and the other doesn't it means you are using a browswer that doesn't support punycode and international domain names.

If neither link works then perhaps the page is being blocked by the great firewall -- though I can't imagine why they would want to block IKEA's website.

[imron]

Oh, and a non-wikipedia link for the standards can be found here (IDN rfc3490 ) and here (Punycode rfc3492).

[Hero Doug]

I got the link working now, sort of, isn't loading the whole page but most of it's there and it's hanging now.

Using Opera, nothing but the best for me (Wait's for the Firefox users ); seriously though it's good to see their opening up the domain names and all but it shouldn't have been done at the application level.