A question about IDN domains

[Harry77]

Hi,
Recently I changed my surname (added the one of my mother) so I bought a domain with this surname, a .com with the letter ò inside.
I made some test and I noticed some problems, for example in the default browser of my android phone if I write the domain in the address bar it searches it in google instead of open that site, but my biggest concern is about email, I made some test with the few addresses I own and everything seems ok but I searched on google and I read about problem about the mail with IDN.

Experience to share?

Thank you

 

[Kate]

Good question

I heard too that IDN domains can be problematic with E-mail, but I don't have any statistics.
I think problems are bound to happen, because a lot of mail servers use outdated software. It could even be an old install of Postfix from 2000. Many servers are not patched as often as they should...

I had problems in the past with a German E-mail address that contained the letter ß, but that was years ago. Now I don't know, perhaps it would work.

I think the main issue with IDNs, is that your correspondents cannot type your domain, because they will often lack the accents on their keyboards. So they must be able to copy-paste it from somewhere (from an E-mail or from the web).
For example, if you are French you don't have ß on your keyboard, and if you are German you probably don't have ç è à or ü.
You have to copy-paste. Spelling the domain name over the phone is not an option if the other party can't write it down.

There are a lot of other issues. For example, many webforms won't recognize IDNs because the validation routines are based on regular expressions. Anything that not a letter, a digit, a hyphen or an underscore will routinely be deemed invalid input.

IDNs are gadgets if you cannot use them in the real world...

 

[Harry77]

Good question

I heard too that IDN domains can be problematic with E-mail, but I don't have any statistics.
I think problems are bound to happen, because a lot of mail servers use outdated software. It could even be an old install of Postfix from 2000. Many servers are not patched as often as they should...

I had problems in the past with a German E-mail address that contained the letter ß, but that was years ago. Now I don't know, perhaps it would work.

I think the main issue with IDNs, is that your correspondents cannot type your domain, because they will often lack the accents on their keyboards. So they must be able to copy-paste it from somewhere (from an E-mail or from the web).
For example, if you are French you don't have ß on your keyboard, and if you are German you probably don't have ç è à or ü.
You have to copy-paste. Spelling the domain name over the phone is not an option if the other party can't write it down.

There are a lot of other issues. For example, many webforms won't recognize IDNs because the validation routines are based on regular expressions. Anything that not a letter, a digit, a hyphen or an underscore will routinely be deemed invalid input.

IDNs are gadgets if you cannot use them in the real world...

Thank you,
you confirmed my doubts.

 

[aramyus]

We have accentuated characters in French too.

They are a nightmare everywhere. Virtually no website works properly with them, including G. No email works properly. Search result including accentuated characters give unpredictable results (you never know if the search will convert or not accentuated char to their non accentuated counterpart). Domains don't work either. Dates are not properly handled (we use dd mm yyyy in France)

It's been the case for the last 20 years or so. I have not seen the slightest improvement in the last 20 years.. I don't expect any improvement for the next 20 years because the complexity of web application increases every year.

To avoid random behavior, I recommend you change to normal ascii characters.

 

[Harry77]

Thank you guys,
I will look for a different .com domain.

 

[wellmanneredsquirrel]

Just a few words from someone who's done a lot of idn stuff:

1) yes there are problems with IDNs in that applications support them unevenly. For example, your Android browser needs to be updated because clearly it should recognize unicode input as per a standard called uts46. All modern browsers follow this standard. Im assuming your domain has a common TLD - some browsers dont recognize newer TLDs

2) in the case of email, there are two issues : unicode before the @ and idn after the @, i will only cover the later.
The issue is one of transforming the unicode into punycode and vice versa. If you only use the punycode form of your domain, you can use it for email like any other domain - its not very appealing tho. If you want your(and the recipient's) email client to recognize when to take unicode and convert to punycode and back, again its an issue of application support like sdsinc said. Gmail supports IDNs, there are others as well.

3) examples using the sharp German s are misleading. This character is one of the two (yes, two) most complicated characters to handle in IDNs, literally all other characters are more straight forward to handle for an application

4) i suspect most if not all of aramyus' problems are ones of encoding : you probably weren't in an all utf-8 environment, which is the web standard now and has been for many years. If youre a euro im pretty sure that is the case as many euro countries used encodings that were basically extended ASCII but not the full unicode - this is especially true of slow evolving environment like the gov or perhaps your workplace. If you buy a new laptop today you will never have any encoding problem on the web, you will not "not see" idn in the serps or any of that. IDNs rank well by the way. Any claim that they are gadgets or that they have been broken for 20yrs and the next 20 are just blanket statements with little merit.

Basically just look at your use case and the apps you will interact with :
-Modern browsers support idns , so you can create websites on IDNs and do linkbuding etc just fine.
-Email server/client are very uneven in their support of IDNs, so if that is your main use, i'd say pass
-adwords : yes supports idns
-twitter : yes supports idns
Etc.

Good luck