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posted by azrael on Thursday August 07 2014, @02:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the hope-this-epistle-finds-you-adequately-healthy dept.

In 2012 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) initiated work on a new email framework that supports addresses incorporating non-Latin and accented Latin characters.

Google has now made it possible for its Gmail users to "send emails to, and receive emails from, people who have these characters in their email addresses". Their goal is to eventually allow its users to create Gmail addresses utilizing these characters.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mendax on Thursday August 07 2014, @05:53AM

    by mendax (2840) on Thursday August 07 2014, @05:53AM (#78323)
    ... but we are prevented from demonstrating easily just how "good" it is here because there is no easy Unicode support (yet). Anyway, I digress.... fubar@gmail.com and fübär@gmail.com become completely different e-mail addresses. The phishers are going to love it. I hope Google implements some sort of mechanism to prevent someone making one of these when the other exists.... for obvious reasons.
    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday August 07 2014, @07:29AM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday August 07 2014, @07:29AM (#78332) Homepage

      It's worse than that. Cyrillic, for one, has a handful of characters which are graphically identical to others in the latin alphabet, but are different unicode characters.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday August 07 2014, @10:48AM

        by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Thursday August 07 2014, @10:48AM (#78370) Journal
        This is even mentioned in the RFC [ietf.org] under 13. Security Considerations
        But be warned: may contain the word "homograph".(For those that don't get it: SoylentNews [soylentnews.org])
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @11:58AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @11:58AM (#78378)

          May Jay-zus stike you down for your sinful and unnatural graphing techniques!

        • (Score: 2) by mendax on Friday August 08 2014, @08:54PM

          by mendax (2840) on Friday August 08 2014, @08:54PM (#79088)

          But be warned: may contain the word "homograph"

          Ah, well, that's okay. I prefer my docs to be written by technical writing queers. Makes it much more interesting. (Okay, I think I ought to go find my asbestos blanket and hide.)

          --
          It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @02:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @02:34PM (#78421)

        Sο dοes Greek. ΕSΡΕCΙΑLLΥ UΡΡΕRCΑSΕ.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @07:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @07:59AM (#78341)

      They could take a lesson from the foobar2000 music player. It has a fantastic search function that lets you search any and all tags in your music files. For purposes of searching it collapses the characters with diacriticals down to the basic character set. So searching for "fubar" will also get you "fübär."

      Gmail already collapses the dots so "joe.blow@gmail.com" and "joeblow@gmail.com" are the same address, it shouldn't be that much harder to map all diacriticals and other look-alike unicode characters down to one canonical version.

      • (Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday August 07 2014, @09:03AM

        by mendax (2840) on Thursday August 07 2014, @09:03AM (#78351)

        iTunes does the same thing. I have a lot of classical MP3's in my collection and there are a lot of accents and umlauts and other nasty diacritics in it but it seems to find everything without me having to punch in the appropriate character.

        --
        It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 07 2014, @06:04AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday August 07 2014, @06:04AM (#78324) Homepage

    So Gmail finally implements Unicode correctly? A bit late for such an international company, I would think.

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    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday August 07 2014, @06:35AM

      by mendax (2840) on Thursday August 07 2014, @06:35AM (#78329)

      Some Unicode characters are dangerous in e-mail addresses for the reasons I alluded to in my post.

      --
      It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.