Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

3.8. What country does the country code ____ correspond to?

Following is a list of many of the countries connected in some fashion to the Internet. It is a safe guess that by the time you read this, additional countries will join the Internet, and some of those in this list may have ceased to exist. Still, this list can give you an idea of the vastness of the Net. I use this list all the time to figure out what country I've just received e-mail from.

Note: This demonstrates another of the limitations of the Internet: things should be readable by humans and translated into machine codes invisibly, but they're usually not. If I get mail from someone at the University of Pisa, Italy, shouldn't I see something that indicates just that, rather than have to decipher a cryptic country code?

For a current list of Internet country codes, read the FAQ "International E-mail Accessibility," which is posted to the Usenet newsgroups comp.mail.misc, news.newusers.questions, and alt.internet.services.

Some of these countries don't have full Internet access; in fact, some have only electronic mail through unstable UUCP or FidoNet gateways. Read the FAQ to find out which countries have what kind of access. It's also important not to send lengthy or useless mail to such countries. The International E-mail Accessibility FAQ says it well:

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The link to some countries marked as being connected to Internet via UUCP or FIDO is often an expensive telephone dialup link. The people in those countries pay dearly for every byte of information sent to them. It is therefore not advised to send an electronic mail to a remote node in such a country asking, "How's the weather there?" When it comes to money, people take things very seriously, especially since funds are scarce. It is a matter of net etiquette to keep this in mind. Junk mail sent to any node that has to pay a lot for its telephone connection will clearly be dealt with HARSHLY and evasive action may well be taken against those not respecting this notice.

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