Special character international address IDN

IDN = Internationalized Domain Name ? Yes. There's no artificial block to make only Roman characters work.

If the keyboard will let you type the address, the software will attempt to send mail to that address. Make sure you have set up the keyboard layouts you want for the iDevice and it should work fine.

Okay, this is interesting. Try these commands

dig -t MX breç.es

host -t MX breç.es

dig -t MX xn--bre-4la.es

host -t MX xn--bre-4la.es

and you'll find no ANSWER SECTION. This is a legitimate test for email software: checking to see that mail to the 'my address' entered will reach the device. Having tested this, the software is concluding that messages to johndoe@breç.es will never reach a destination, so it's not letting you enter that address.

You can find a punicode conversion utility at

https://xnode.org/page/Punicode_Converter

However, I seem to find some other Apple utilities don't seem to be handling punicode conversion properly. This domain appears to be legitimate:

dig -t MX pógmothóin.now.ie

host -t MX pógmothóin.now.ie

dig -t MX xn--pgmothin-v3af.now.ie

host -t MX xn--pgmothin-v3af.now.ie

Under OS X 10.8 the versions using unicode characters return no answer, though the versions using punicode (the third and fourth) seem to work fine. My tentative conclusion is that something isn't understanding unicode domain names correctly, so even if breç.es was receiving email it wouldn't be handled correctly by some Apple software. However, I'm not an expert on this. Perhaps someone who is will read this and educate us.

Here is an old test page for email IDN which may be of help. Not sure if anything has changed...

http://idn.icann.org/E-mail_test

Ooooh, thank you. This does suggest that Apple's tools aren't handling the Unicode versions of the addresses correctly.

Simon Slavin wrote:

This does suggest that Apple's tools aren't handling the Unicode versions of the addresses correctly.

What errors do you get with which test address? I think it also depends on the support available at your mail server and the intermediary email handlers.

At a 10.8 command line, on a Mac with properly configured DNS, compare the results you get from these two:

dig -t MX xn--fsqu00a.xn--0zwm56d

dig -t MX 例子.测试

I believe they should be identical, or at the very least that the ANSWER sections should be identical. However, I'm not an expert on IDN and would welcome input from anyone who is.

(For those playing along at home wondering why we're talking about this now, checking to see that the domain of your email address has an MX (mail exchanger) record is a common way of checking to see that the email address you entered is legitimate. This helps to stop people accidentally typing their own email address incorrectly, or using your software to send hard-to-trace spam.)

Using Mail in 10.7.5, messages sent to both of those addresses gave the same successful response from icann, so they seem to be equivalent by that test. I don't know how to interpret the results of the terminal commands, or whether terminal.app can really be relied upon to handle non-latin text appropriately in that particular way.

PS I had success with a comcast mail server. Apple's icloud mail server would not accept either version of the address.

Correction: The chinese domain email was successful using the server at hover.com. It was rejected by icloud, gmail, and comcast.

josepinheiro wrote:

Shouldn't apple mail access these idn adresses, since it advertises as so?

Could you provide a reference to the advertisement you are talking about?

IDN is pretty new, and it seems not all mail systems can handle it yet. I can use IDN with iOS Mail with one server, but not with icloud or gmail. I have not tried webmail yet.

Even just one non-ascii character puts your address in the special IDN category, no way around that.

You can ask Apple to fix its mail servers via

http://www.apple.com/feedback

If you are using different mail servers, you should also contact them.

PS Can you send mail to your IDN address from iOS using some other email address?

Just a reminder that the OP's problem was not in sending mail to an address but in entering an address into iOS as their own email address.

I believe that enough time has gone by that Apple's mail software should be handling IDN addresses correctly. The fault, if there is a fault and I'm not barking entirely up the wrong tree, isn't with mail servers, but with Apple's software not handling IDN domain names correctly. We seem to have identified this fault in three different pieces of Apple software: iOS's email configuration software, OS X's dig command, and OS X's host command.

I don't know whether all these pieces of software call the same operating system service to handle domains, or they each have separate code in that does it. But yes, I think josepinheiro has spotted somethng he or she can report to Apple. However, the report must include the genuine email address that needs to work, or Apple won't have anything they can test. There needs to be a proper working email server accepting messages to that address.

josepinheiro wrote:

My adress has normal occidental characters and one special character only, a "ç".

Could you send me a test message from that address (tom at bluesky dot org)? I would like to see whether it comes through and whether I can reply, using the different servers I have access to.

Thanks for the message. I sent 4 replies, using two different servers for both OS X Mail and iOS Mail. iOS gave me a warning that the address did not appear to be valid, but seemed to send it anyway.

How many messages did you get? If less than 4, which ones?