Russia continues to invent the internet. Email is next.

The launch of the Cyrillic internet domain has led to a number of unexpected challenges, which the Russian internet is currently grappling with. The Ukrainian internet may face similar problems if the national Cyrillic domain .УКР becomes a reality. We have previously written about the difficulties of the initial registration period for .РФ domains, when many trademark owners were unable to obtain domain names. A new problem facing the Russian Cyrillic internet is email.

After all, it's logical that if a country has switched to Cyrillic web page addresses, then its email should also be Cyrillic. The transition to a "national" email system turned out to be even more challenging than with Cyrillic domains. Email addresses are written using the "@" symbol, for which there is no adequate replacement in Cyrillic.

Therefore, a few days ago, the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media announced a tender to study the feasibility of launching an email service in the .рф domain. The tender has been allocated a whopping 10 million rubles (or approximately 2.5 million hryvnias). The winner of the tender is required to share their ideas on how to implement Cyrillic email addresses online, such as "Ivan@sidorov.рф."

Furthermore, the winner of the tender is tasked with developing a system of unique email addresses for citizens and publicizing it. Another challenge in creating fully Cyrillic addresses is that the internet currently uses Latin-script logins, and the first part of the address is the username. Using mixed addresses, such as "name@почта.рф," is pointless, as it contradicts the very idea of ​​Cyrillic domains. Cyrillic logins are unlikely to appear for at least five years. This is why the problem of Cyrillic email is so serious and global.

It is noteworthy that standards for non-Latin email addresses have not yet been approved worldwide; they may not be approved until 2011 at the earliest.

Russian authorities are particularly sensitive to the creation of Cyrillic domains and addresses, as these changes promise to implement an e-government system in Russia—interaction between government agencies and citizens via the internet and the development of a range of electronic government services.

Interestingly, analysts aren't ruling out the possibility of a special new symbol replacing the "@" symbol in Cyrillic email, which will appear on all new keyboards. The authors of this idea promise that this symbol will be available on all keyboard layouts.

The winner of the tender will be announced on July 15. The company will have 110 days to develop postal innovations.

The winning company's task includes: describing the addressing system, the architecture of the new solution, the required software suite, and data protection principles. At the same time, the company will be required to build a prototype to showcase its ideas.

So, they've allocated three months to fundamentally change one of the most important services of our time. It'll be interesting to see if they can pull it off.