Meet ๐น, an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph known as the Ankh, symbolising life.
Believe it or not, the domain naming system overseen by ICANN allows certain internationalised domain names (IDNs) to be registered using Egyptian hieroglyphs.
I happen to own one of them.
๐น.com
Having already set up a URL redirect to OwnTheDot.com, I thought I'd put the domain to another use and create an email address.
Not just any email address. This one:
๐น@๐น.com
Simple enough, I thought.
Well, apparently not.
I was rather disappointed when my email provider explained that it couldn't support Unicode characters before the @ symbol.
The domain itself? No problem.
Behind the scenes, ๐น.com is represented as xn--wb8d.com, using something called Punycode. This allows internationalised domain names to work with existing DNS infrastructure.
But that little Egyptian symbol before the @?
Not supported by my provider.
And even if I found an email provider willing to accept it, there's no guarantee everyone else could send me an email or reply.
So here I am, owning a perfectly legitimate domain name that I can't quite use the way I'd like.
Could Handshake eventually help?
Handshake already offers an alternative approach to owning and resolving names. Perhaps one day someone will develop an email application that embraces that independence and supports unusual addresses like mine.
Of course, getting the rest of the email world to play along would still be a challenge.
But wouldn't it be nice?
Thousands of years after the Egyptians created the Ankh, we're still trying to work out how to send it through the post.
And if anyone knows how to make ๐น@๐น.com work reliably, I'd love to hear about it.
Own the name. Own the dot.