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Ask HN: When will MTA/MUAs accept IDN emails?

2 pointsby kerouantonabout 8 years ago
I&#x27;ve got a IDN domain (éé.net - xn--9caa.net) to play with (and to shorten URLs). Quite interesting.<p>Year after year, I expect MTAs and MUAs to properly implement punycode handling in email addresses, but a vast majority of them are still broken (Thunderbird, Exchange, Outlook, etc) even on the latest versions, as they complain, fail, or even crash. I&#x27;m wondering why there aren&#x27;t anyone focusing on this issue, as IDN is becoming commonplace. It seems only Gmail is able to properly handle those emails, as well as my provider Gandi.<p>Here are some test email addresses to play with : - éé@éé.net (xn--9caa@xn--9caa.net) - éé.net@éé.net (xn--9caa.net@xn--9caa.net) According to RFCs, those emails are legit. (more here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_email).<p>I&#x27;d be interested in any feedback on success rate while sending a message, and obviously an impulse to MTA&#x2F;MUA developers so they can handle this properly.<p>As an example, Thunderbird 45.8.0 (latest version) accepts sending to éé@éé.net, but generates an error when sending to éé.net@éé.net, complaining it doesn&#x27;t allows non-ascii characters in the local part of the email address... That&#x27;s clearly a bug (since the former address which also contains non-ascii is accepted).<p>Many thanks. Bruno

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