Welcome to Afilias Global Email
The standards body of the Internet, the IETF, is developing support for multilingual email. Current email standards restrict an email address from using the full range of international characters. This new standard will allow people to get an email address in almost any language.
The IETF has published RFC 4952 which describes the overall technical changes and framework for this new standard. Several additional drafts are in the process of being issued that provide the detailed descriptions of the extensions to the standard email protocols. These changes will allow the local part of the email address (to the left of the @) to be in any language script represented in the Unicode standard. See the IETF working group for Email Address Internationalization (EAI) for full technical details or Wikipedia for a less technical description.
The current status of this work is Experimental. As software developers add these extensions to different email systems, there is a need to test these implementations to verify that the proposed changes to the protocol work as intended. Testing that email can be exchanged between different implementations is also an important step towards establishing a new standard.
Afilias is hosting a trial of Internationalized Email that conforms to the modified email protocol. Individual users may sign up for a web email account with a user name of their choice in any of fourteen languages. Test email may be sent between any of the test language domains being hosted on the Afilias server, or between the Afilias server and other implementations of the EAI standards effort.
Afilias is a leading provider of global registry services that leverage proven technology to deliver fast, reliable and secure service. Afilias technology supports a wide range of applications, including Internet domain registries such as .INFO, .ORG, .MOBI, .ASIA, .AERO, and many country code domains. More information is available on the company web site at www.afilias.info.
To participate in this trial, register for an international email address on the form below.
Click here to register for a new email account
Click here to login.