By Mark Svancarek, Chair, UA EAI Working Group

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) has published a new guide to help email service or tool providers, software vendors, and developers to self-certify the readiness of their email services, tools, and utilities for Email Address Internationalization (EAI). The new EAI Self-Certification Guide is the cornerstone of the EAI Self-Certification Program that the UASG’s EAI Working Group (WG) has been developing over the past years, with the support of ICANN org.

EAI support is an important element of the Universal Acceptance (UA) of domain names and email addresses. UA means that tools and systems can accept, validate, process, store, and display all valid domain names and email addresses equally. The content in this guide is based on the UASG-issued UA and EAI readiness framework (UASG026 Report).

The EAI Self-Certification Guide contains a score generator that enables email product owners to self-certify their products based on three levels: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Product owners can promote their products using this classification. A standardized classification system also helps IT and procurement managers to evaluate email services and tools based on EAI-readiness levels.

The guide applies to all kinds of software which stores or processes email messages or email addresses. This includes not only components like email servers, but also components that store email addresses (e.g., contact lists) or send email messages (e.g., calendars).

Email systems are generally made up of multiple components. This comprehensive guide permits rating of individual components (e.g., Mail User Agent (MUA) and EAI-ready webmail clients, Internet Messaging Access Protocol (IMAP), etc.) as well as rating of systems.

In addition to developing the EAI Self-Certification Guide, the EAI WG will continue to focus on the EAI Self-Certification Program, as it is an important component of the UASG’s 5-year strategic plan (FY25-FY29). Future efforts include:

  • Implementing the EAI Self-Certification Program to help highlight and promote the use of Universal Acceptance-ready email services and tools
  • Encouraging certification and its use among producers and customers
  • Engaging with technical community to support EAI
  • Producing EAI self-certification training materials

EAI has the power to bring billions of people online – particularly those around the world who live in countries that speak languages not based on the Latin alphabet. Email service providers can create a better experience for these users by incorporating systems that allow customers to use email addresses in their languages and writing systems. By adopting EAI, email service providers are supporting all current users as well as making the Internet more accessible and inclusive for the next billion who come online.

The UASG is a community-based team working to share this vision for the Internet of the future with those who construct this space: technology developers and system and email administrators. To learn more about the guide and how to make your systems EAI-ready, contact the UASG at info@uasg.tech.