Every Russian Citizen to Get an Official Email Account and Learn To Use @ in a New Way

As some of you may be aware, the huge trend for various countries that don’t use Latin alphabet in their official languages is introducing their own alphabets into online communications – and not only in the form of support for specific fonts where needed to send an email or create a blog post (which has been here forever). Now such countries all deal with the idea of having internet domain names written in their own languages using their specific alphabets.

Russia became one of the first countries to start registering domains written using Cyrillic – and it all started with various authorities and official institutions registering their names for the citizens to be able to talk to them using the familiar characters instead of the hassle of using Latin characters which may be difficult for people who don’t speak any foreign language (which is quite unusual for the younger generation but still).

Now that registration of domains written using Cyrillic is under way, the authorities of the country are ready to face yet another problem: that of using email in Cyrillic alphabet as well. Given that domains can now be written in Cyrillic as well as login names for account holders, it is obvious that email should be the next issue to be taken into account – so this new generation of email accounts is supposed to become the official communication tool for authorities with citizens.

What now happens is that the Ministry of Communications has announced a tender for the companies to come up with an idea of how such new email accounts should be used in official communications with citizens – as well as create a concept of how citizens are supposed to be informed of their newly obtained official email accounts.

The tender will pay about one third of a million dollars to the winner who will work on the concept within the summer months to deliver the results some time in fall so that the government could make a decision on further promoting the concept. The result should be that in the very near future every Russian citizens will get their own official email account (that will most certainly serve as something of a digital signature as well), be informed of their credentials to access such accounts and begin using them in various communications with the government or local authorities.

And while the problem of creating a unique email account for every citizen of the country is probably a challenging one (as the winner in the tender will need to decide how to avoid repetitions because many people can have fully matching names so there should be other information used like date of birth or passport number which is probably the easiest way to go as it is already unique), there is another challenge here that will probably be even more difficult to handle: the problem of the @ character.

The problem is that as it is now, the character can only be accessed by a person writing in Russian by switching the keyboard layout to any Latin-based alphabet they may be using on their computer in addition to Russian and using the same key of the number 2 on the keyboard by holding Shift at the same time. Using this combination in a Russian keyboard layout will produce a quotation mark instead of the @ character which is for now inevitable when you attempt to write an email to someone by actually typing the address (honestly, I can’t remember the last time I actually had to type the address as I always click them on a web page or select from my contacts after starting to type the name of the person I want to send an email to).

So the big challenge is now to invent some measure that will allow Russian citizens to write their own official personal email addresses as well as the addresses of the institutions they want to reach without switching the keyboard layout only to enter one single character. The initial idea was to “simply” replace the mark with some other symbol in the email addresses but research demonstrated that it would involve modifications to protocols which can hardly be achieved. Another solution that is currently discussed is to negotiate with keyboard manufacturers so that they add a special button for the @ character that will always be available in any layout used. To me both solutions sound rather absurd as I have a feeling that they can hardly be realistic at all as too many issues are involved here.

But the worst part is that I have no idea why my taxes go into crazy things like arranging for every citizen to have a dedicated official email account – especially when many people already have quite a number of such accounts (for free!) and those who don’t will hardly know how to use the official one anyway and will still use the traditional forms of communications like personal visits and phone calls to communicate with the authorities – probably less efficient but already working at least anyway. And living in Russia I can definitely confirm that making something work – no matter how good the initial idea is – will be something that is more than difficult to achieve if achieved at all.

Via (in Russian)