Afilias Participates in Global IDN Email Testing

On June 19, 2012, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) conducted the first public test of Internationalized Domain Name (IDN)-based email.

IDN email allows people to use IDN top-level domains as email addresses.

As part of the testing, emails were sent and received on IDN domains to recipients in Beijing, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, the United States, and Canada.

Testing has shown that IDN email works successfully. RFC 6531 extends the standard SMTP protocol and is designed to handle messages with addresses using IDN domains. China's active testing of RFC 6531 and IDN email is due to the fact that many users in that country may experience problems with everyday use of the Latin alphabet.