The majority of email services used in Russia do not recognize email addresses in the Cyrillic Internet domain (.рф), the press service of the Russian R01 registrar company said.
Specialists carried out tests on four email services, widely used in Russia - Rambler, Yandex, Mail.Ru and Google's Gmail. They sent messages from the services to an address in the .рф domain, written in two different formats, one with Cyrillic symbols (mailtest@пример.испытание), and the other with special encoding (mailtest@xn--e1afmkfd.xn--80akhbyknj4f).
Only Yandex successfully sent the message to both addresses. Mail.Ru and Rambler managed to send it only to the encoded address, while Gmail completely failed the test.
Over 3,000 domains, which will be used as email services, have been registered in the Cyrillic domain so far, according to R01.
In November 2008, .рф was approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) following a request by President Dmitry Medvedev. The domain is aimed at raising the status of Russian as a global language, and is hoped to expand Internet use among Russian speakers unfamiliar with Latin characters.
According to the Russian Press and Communications Ministry, the number of websites operating under Cyrillic URLs may reach 50,000 by the end of 2010.
The Russian presidential and government websites became the first to use the Cyrillic Internet domain after it was officially launched in Russia on May 13.
MOSCOW, November 10 (RIA Novosti)
