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How does IDN-domains (domains with international letters)?
How does IDN-domains (domains with international letters)?
Fredrik Björklund avatar
Written by Fredrik Björklund
Updated over a week ago

IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Names and refers to domain names that contain letters and characters from various languages, such as å, ä, ö, é, and ü.

When our current global domain system was developed, it was not intended to support characters other than a-z and 0-9. IDN domains were introduced later, and our national top-level domain .se started supporting them in 2003. This means that IDN domains have some limitations and do not work the same way as regular domain names.

IDN domains primarily work as web addresses in browsers. You can register and point an IDN domain to a website, but you cannot use them for email addresses. Efforts have been underway for many years to solve this problem, but it is still unclear when this will be resolved.

Since the domain system is not designed to support characters other than a-z and 0-9, IDN domains are transliterated into functioning addresses. These addresses always start with "xn--". For example, the IDN domain "räksmörgås.se" is rewritten as "xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se".

If you want to register an IDN domain, we recommend that you supplement it with a regular domain name. In this way, you can have the IDN domain "räksmörgås.se" pointing to the regular domain "raksmorgas.se" and use email addresses like "[email protected]".

We offer support for the use of an unlimited number of domain names in our web hosting packages and domain management, at no additional cost beyond the domain fee.

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