Gmail leads the global (as in non-Latin) email race

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It’s official.

internationalized_email_address

Gmail supports (to a degree) non-Latin email addresses.

That is, you can receive an email from someone with a non-Latin email address, as well as send an email to such an address.

You cannot (yet) setup a Google email account with a non-Latin address, though this is coming. As well as support across Google’s many other web services.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago.

And I view this as a missed opportunity for competitive email providers — an opportunity to get a competitive advantage on Google.

As much as we like to bash Google for privacy issues (many well deserved) the company continues to lead when it comes to supporting the world’s Internet users.

I would love to see Microsoft and Apple put up a good fight in this regard — and would certainly love to help. Because there is still an opportunity for a company to innovate on the usability end of actual implementation. But, most of all, I want to see how non-Latin email addresses lead to a new era in non-Latin domain names, brand names, services, and business models.

After all, this feature may be viewed as a luxury right now but it’s going to quickly be viewed as necessity.

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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