14 DAY TRIAL // Google is taking a new step towards turning Gmail into a tool designed for the global community by enabling users to communicate with email addresses that don’t necessarily contain Latin characters.
“Less than half of the world’s population has a mother tongue that uses the Latin alphabet. And even fewer people use only the letters A-Z. So if your name (or that of your favorite pet) contains accented characters (like ‘José Ramón’) or is written in another script like Chinese or Devanagari, your email address options are limited,” writes Pedro Chaparro Monferrer, a software engineer with Google.
Starting today, Gmail will recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters, while the same changes will be spread to Calendar in the nearby future.
This means that Gmail users will be able to send and receive email to and from email addresses that have such characters in their composition. This is only the first step in this direction, but it’s still a big one. The next one will hopefully be allowing users to create Gmail accounts with such characters, and it looks like Google is already working on this.
Monferrer explains that a couple of years ago an organization called Internet Engineering Task Force create a new email standard that supports email addresses in non-Latin and accented Latin characters. For the standard to become a reality, however, all email providers and websites that ask users to provide an account must adopt it.
This is a really difficult thing considering how many email providers are out there and how many sites require email addresses for login. It will obviously be a lot of years before this standard will be largely adopted, but Google has hopefully kick started the whole trend.
If that is so, we’ll probably soon discover other major email providers supporting such addresses and even the whole wave of new services offering end-to-end encryption that popped up following the NSA revelations.
Google notes that last month alone, the company added 13 new languages in Gmail and will continue to bring in more. “Language should never be a barrier when it comes to connecting with others and with this step forward, truly global email is now even closer to becoming a reality.”
This is an ambitious project and we’ll hopefully see more acceptance for the idea in the near future, starting with Google’s many services. While Gmail and Calendar are already on the list, there are plenty more in the company’s portfolio.
