[nawitus]

It's not trivial. This is 2014, not 1960. If computers should do one thing correctly, it should be to display text. As it happens, only a small subset of languages can be displayed correctly in email addresses. It's completely and utterly ridiculous.

Sure, it's understandable as email is an old and a widely used protocol, so changes are difficult to push through. But it's not acceptable, and it's not "relatively trivial".

There's no risk of "breaking the web", since the web is already broken for billions of people.

If email can't be made to support UTF-8, then email should be replaced altogether.

[zokier]

The major problems are not really technical in nature. Homographs, Unicode madness (normalization etc..), and the biggest problem of all: input methods. It would be highly ironical if "international" "more global" email would lead to more nationalized islands because only local people can input those "international" email addresses. A single global character set (in the non-technical sense) is required for a system to be really global. You might argue that ASCII being that global set is eurocentric, but there isn't really any good alternatives available. Afaik pretty much every computer can input ASCII with relative ease no matter how exotic their users native script is.