Full transition to Cyrillic: Russia launches support for email addresses without Latin characters

Technical breakthrough: end of the hybrid address era

The Internet Technical Center (ITC), the operator of the national top-level domains .RU and .РФ, has announced the implementation of a long-awaited feature: users can now register email addresses consisting exclusively of Russian alphabet characters. This means a complete move away from the need to use Latin letters before the "@" sign. Previously, the system only allowed a hybrid format where the local part of the address (before "@") had to be in Latin, while the domain part could be in Cyrillic (e.g., [email protected]). Now, an address like [email protected] is valid and functional.

Technical basis: from IDNA to SMTPUTF8

The implementation of this capability became possible thanks to the realization of the EAI (Email Address Internationalization) standard and the SMTPUTF8 extension. Although these standards were adopted by the international community back in 2012 for the correct handling of national alphabet characters in the local part of addresses, their full implementation in Russian infrastructure took more than a decade. The groundwork was laid as early as 2003 with the introduction of the IDNA (Internationalized Domain Names in Applications) standard, which allowed the use of Cyrillic in domain names. However, as practice shows, the infrastructure of the Cyrillic domain zone supported the technology only partially for a long time, leaving the local part of the address "locked" in Latin.

Statistics and usage of the .РФ domain

The Russian Cyrillic top-level domain .РФ, officially delegated to Russia on May 12, 2010, continues to demonstrate significant activity. At the moment, more than 806,000 domain names are registered in the zone. An analysis of the usage structure shows that the .РФ domain is not exclusively a "technical" or "parking" resource: almost a third (32.1%) of names lead to applications and landing pages, about a quarter (24.1%) — to full-fledged unique websites. Email services account for 12.3% of the total, confirming the demand for email infrastructure in the Cyrillic zone.

Global context of Cyrillic domains

Russia is not the only country using Cyrillic in the domain zone. To date, there are 17 Cyrillic top-level domains in the world: 9 of them are national IDN domains, and 8 are generic. Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the European Union have registered their own national Cyrillic domains. However, it is the implementation of the full cycle of Cyrillic email in .РФ and .RU that places Russia among the countries with the most developed internet localization infrastructure.