Afilias Partners with .JO Registry

Partnership helps bring native language email to Arabic internet users.

Afilias, a provider of internet infrastructure services and the Registry operator for .INFO, today announced that it has partnered with the National Information Technology Center of Jordan, to produce the first public demonstration of an email message between two completely internationalized (or IDN) email addresses in the Arabic language, using its new IDN email technology and a fully IDN domain name and IDN TLD from the .JO Registry.

It says that at the APTLD meeting in Amman, Jordan, the company and the .JO Registry demonstrated sending and receiving email using the fully internationalized email addresses الاردن.الدولي-البريد@تجربة and الاردن.الدولي-البريد@مبيعات. Email was sent from and to these addresses using both a web-based email client and a mobile application.

The company mentions that the Jordanian Registry officially launched the Arabic version of its ccTLD as .alordon which translates to xn--mgbayh7gpa using the Punycode algorithm and is visible in Arabic as الاردن. Registration in the new IDN version of the ccTLD was launched on October 11, 2010, beginning with a sunrise period for Governmental Entities and Diplomatic Missions, and shall be followed by a registration period for trademark holders.

It explains that internet users are familiar with using domains that are written in ASCII (Latin/English characters) - on websites, in email, and in many other internet applications. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) were first launched in 2004 based on an IETF standard called IDNA (RFC 5890), which uses the Punycode encoding algorithm to represent non-ASCII characters found in Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hindi and other languages, into ASCII names that the DNS system can resolve. This allows internet users to type a domain name in their local script using their native language, instead of an English translation.

The company articulates that since 2004, businesses and individual users have been able to register second level IDN domains in many scripts across many top-level domain (TLD) extensions. However, both the user name portion of an email address and the TLD itself has been ASCII-only. Recently ICANN approved the introduction of IDNs at the top level, so TLDs like .JO can now be visible in a native script like Arabic as .الاردن.

According to it, the company's IDN Email is a software package that supports 'Email Address Internationalization' (EAI), a standard under development by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This standard removes the restriction of English-only alphabets in email addresses. The IDN Email application allows people to use almost any language in their email address. The company's implementation follows RFC 4952 and additional draft RFCs that are in the process of being standardized. These changes allow both the username and the domain name of an email address to be in any language/script represented in the Unicode standard. More information about its IDN Email solution and how to become a beta partner can be found at www.afilias.info/idnemail.

"With the 83 percent of the world's population estimated to be non-English speaking, this is an important first step in bringing a useful internet to the majority of the world's internet users which were previously shut-out of using the internet in their native language," said John Kane, Vice President of Corporate Services for Afilias. "The adoption of IDN domain names has been inhibited by the lack of technical support within email programs for internationalized addresses which would still be compatible with the global DNS system. With Afilias' unique and standards-compliant IDN Email solution, we are able to finally address this problem and facilitate IDN adoption in any language."

"The final link in the conversion of the web to a truly global audience is to give all users of the internet their website and email identity in a form that truly represents them, in their own language," added Dr. Nabeel Al-Fayoumi, Government CIO / Director General of the National IT Center / .JO and .الاردن Registry. "We are pleased to cooperate with Afilias on an historic and important move forward in technology that will empower Arabic and other non-English speaking internet users around the world to communicate in their own language."