The thing you're forgetting is that EAI is for people who aren't friends with a, b and c. I have a runic address (just for fun). If we pretend that runes are the only alphabet I know well, then yes, I could receive email from you. that part is easy: My computer can display any alphabet you can type. But what about the rest? Even if you could enter my address without being able to type runes, what would you do? I could receive mail from you, but how can you send it and what can you send? There's roughly a hundred million internet users in West Bengal and Bangladesh who can read and type bangla, but don't know the latin alphabet very well. EAI is for letting them send email among themselves. The keyboard they have expresses what they can do, in a rather harsh manner. Any time you start thinking about how to let bangla people send email using runes, you've lost contact with reality and the problems you're solving aren't IMO interesting any more. Arnt