Ever since you’ve been able to get an email address you have been required to sign up using non-accented latin characters. That won’t always have to be the case though.
A new email standard that supports addresses with non-Latin and accented Latin characters was created back in 2012. But before this standard becomes a reality, every email provider must adopt it.
Today, Google is leading the charge with an announcement that Gmail will now recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters.
Less than half of the world’s population has a mother tongue that uses the Latin alphabet. And even fewer people use only the letters A-Z. So if your name (or that of your favorite pet) contains accented characters (like “José Ramón”) or is written in another script like Chinese or Devanagari, your email address options are limited.
Now Gmail users can send emails to, and receive emails from, people who have these characters in their email addresses.
Google says this is just a first step and there are still a ways to go. Eventually Google wants to make it possible for users to create Gmail accounts using non-latin and accented characters.
