A Quick Update on where I think we’re at with respect to EAI Work of the UASG

EAI Readiness – Two Phases

I see EAI Readiness of email software and services falling into two phases.

Phase 1 is the ability to send to and receive from EAI email addresses (unicode@unicode.unicode).   In this phase the SMTPUTF8 response is available.   I think that Gmail and MSFT’s online services are now in this state.  Postfix and Exim and Halon are also supposed to be in this state, as may others.   This is for the EAI Evaluation study to establish.

Phase 2 is the ability to host an EAI address.   Coremail, XgenPlus, Throughwave, OpenFind all contend that they are able to do this. Again, we can say this with confidence once the EAI Evaluation study is established.

EAI Documentation

• We have the Quick Guide to EAI published.   This will be reviewed later this year when we have a better understanding of EAI, particularly EAI Good practices
• We have a training slide deck to EAI published.   Again, we’ll review this once our Introduction to EAI is published
• An Introduction to EAI – a contract for this has been let and work has started.   I expect to have a first taste of this available to this group to look at in about two weeks.  This will be similar to our UASG007  Introduction to Universal Acceptance, which starts with the basics of the different components of legacy email and moves into the details of EAI – where they differ, and UASG Recommendations for good practice – including downgrading.

Downgrading

At the EAI Meeting in Guangzhou the UASG agreed that an automated transformation of Unicode mailbox names was not good practice and that making use of a pre-determined ASCII alias was a better practice.

EAI Day

We will work towards our first EAI day in the first quarter of 2019.  At that point we will celebrate those who have achieved Phase 1 of EAI Readiness.  

EAI Evaluation

We’re going to adjust the process for the EAI Evaluation into three phases.

• Phase 1 – Define the evaluation criteria and use cases for EAI Readiness.  Also define the criteria for inclusion of email software and services in the evaluation.   This should allow evaluators to have much better clarity on what they’re evaluating and how we define success.
• Phase 2 – To test the evaluation criteria by evaluating one email eco system and, if necessary, refine the evaluation criteria.   Once this is done we should have a clearer understanding of the effort involved to do each evaluation.  We may also revise the selection criteria for the software and services that we evaluate.
• Phase 3 – to perform the complete evaluation on all the selected software and services and produce a report.

I hope to have Phase 1 finished by the end of this quarter.

EAI Strategy

The UASG, as we engage with registrars and hosting providers and ISPs, are asking them if they have an EAI Strategy.  We’re asking the same of IDN TLD operators.   We have seen reports from both Thailand and Taiwan that the availability of an EAI ready service results in better customer satisfaction and domain name renewals.  By having an EAI strategy they will be able to better serve their customers.

Don Hollander

Secretary General – UASG

Skype: Don_Hollander

Don Hollander

Secretary General – UASG

Skype: Don_Hollander