
MailChimp can’t process UTF-8 characters in email address prefixes - Fizzadar
http://pointlessramblings.com/posts/What_Mailchimp_Considers_an_Email/
======
tyingq
Pretty light on details. By "prefix", do they mean the local part of email
address? Like the "someuser" in "someuser@example.com" ?

If so, it's not that unusual that it wouldn't be supported. The local-part
used to be constrained to ascii only. RFC6530 (SMTPUTF8) added UTF-8 support,
but it's optional. Google only started supporting it in 2014, for example:
[https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-
toward-...](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-more-
global-email.html) Microsoft has support in some places, but not others, etc.

~~~
colinbartlett
Correct, there's a Github issue linked[1] that shows åliå@test.com as an
example.

1\. [https://github.com/charlesthk/python-
mailchimp/issues/116](https://github.com/charlesthk/python-
mailchimp/issues/116)

~~~
Twirrim
It looks like that has been fixed:

[https://github.com/charlesthk/python-
mailchimp/commit/5a4ed6...](https://github.com/charlesthk/python-
mailchimp/commit/5a4ed63954aebe0e0f27a680063a8ee27d6efb66)

~~~
tyingq
It was just mentioned to confirm that it was the "local-part" that was in
question.

The article notes that fixing it in the python client doesn't fix the upstream
lack of support on mailchimp's back end.

This just seems to be a case of high expectations. Support of utf8 local-part
is spotty across lots of providers and software.

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true_religion
> How can you run mail campaigns without access to these users? Ridiculous.

These users? You couldn't even email them from Outlook until just last year,
2016! How many users in the world would have accepted having an email account
that no one using Exchange servers could handle? That cuts you (the user) off
from hundreds of millions of people on corporate networks.

~~~
mijoharas
> That cuts you (the user) off from hundreds of millions of people on
> corporate networks.

Arguably an advantage.

~~~
tyingq
It's not just Exchange. RFC6530 support is pretty spotty.

Fastmail, which is pretty popular here, only allows a-z0-9_ in usernames. I
don't see a "250 SMTPUTF8" reply when I connect to their server and EHLO. So,
it's likely they don't support it either.

~~~
yladiz
I use Fastmail and have sent myself a testing email with non-ASCII emails,
like with Korean or Chinese characters. So 안녕@mydomain works with Fastmail.

~~~
tyingq
So apparently if you host your own domain with them they do?

However, they don't appear to support it for username@fastmail.com. Either for
sign up, or for live delivery.
[http://imgur.com/a/Otf4f](http://imgur.com/a/Otf4f) (see both images)

Try sending to 안녕@mydomain from a gmail account...it looks like they may not
be supporting SMTPUTF8 correctly. Which could result in sending-to-yourself
working, but not from an outside source.

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Freak_NL
I had to reread some bits to figure out that they are talking about email
_addresses_ which MailChimp fails on if they contain non-ASCII UTF-8
characters in the user part of the address, not the actual email message.

For some reason this person calls an email address an _email_.

~~~
atomical
Why is that important?

~~~
Freak_NL
That blog post makes no sense until you substitute email for email address —
non-ASCII UTF-8 characters in the body of an email is no problem provided the
right encoding is used.

Perhaps other readers will find that useful to figure out the intended
message.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> substitute email for email address

Language nitpick: that should be the other way around, _for_ meaning roughly
_instead of_ in this expression. I guess this might be going the way of
_comprised of_ and the like (once considered a clear error, but now so
widespread that it's considered pedantic to reject it).

~~~
1_2__4
You should be downvoted, you're right and the order they used is wrong and
requires your brain to rearrange it. If op wanted to use that ordering they
should have used "with" in place of "for".

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criddell
A year or two ago Cory Doctorow asked MailChimp how to get a list of all the
mail lists an address is on and they wouldn't help him with that. MailChimp
claims to be against spamming, but if that were true, I think they would give
users a management screen.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/17/death-
by-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/17/death-by-spam-lazy-
email-marketing-is-killing-our-inboxes)

~~~
twunde
Frankly, I agree with Mailchimp. Giving access to that information raises
privacy issues (someone could potentially see that I'm subscribed to an
embarrassing newsletter our at least use that information in phishing or
advertising). Additionally it's a product that doesn't provide much benefit to
Mailchimp and their paying customers

~~~
tyingq
Might be hard technically as well. I suspect it isn't one huge database with a
nice indexed query to return all lists associated with an email.

~~~
johannes1234321
Even then this should be possible to gather quite quickly and if not they'd
still be able to collect it in a batch job and send result later by mail.

~~~
tyingq
Assuming a database or table per list owner, that's X separate queries where X
is the total number of MailChimp customers. Don't see how that would be quick
or easy. MailChimp says they have over a million customers.

------
Twirrim
MailChimps brief article about it:
[http://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts/management/international-
ch...](http://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts/management/international-characters-
in-mailchimp)

"Note Although MailChimp can process UTF-8 characters in most parts of our
application, we cannot process UTF-8 characters in your subscribers' email
address prefixes. We do accept Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) servers, so
it’s alright to have UTF-8 characters in the domain name.

For example, we’ll block direcciónelectrónica@domain.com because the
international characters are in the prefix, but we'll allow an address like
test@ñoñó1234.com, where the characters are in the domain."

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jimnotgym
A bigger issue for me is that our ERP doesn't use UTF-8 for emails. I don't
recall ever being told that this was a problem for our user base. We have a
large number of contacts in Europe who forego their accents for the ascii
equivalent

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user5994461
Never seen an accent in an email. It probably never was possible.

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lgleason
Mail Chimp is not a great platform. There are better alternatives.

