MailChimp can’t process UTF-8 characters in email address prefixes

by Fizzadar on 7/23/2017, 11:24 AM with 28 comments
  • by tyingq on 7/23/2017, 1:46 PM

    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-... Microsoft has support in some places, but not others, etc.

  • by true_religion on 7/23/2017, 1:30 PM

    > 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.

  • by Freak_NL on 7/23/2017, 1:17 PM

    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.

  • by criddell on 7/23/2017, 3:12 PM

    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-...

  • by Twirrim on 7/23/2017, 3:00 PM

    MailChimps brief article about it: http://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts/management/international-ch...

    "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."

  • by jimnotgym on 7/23/2017, 3:11 PM

    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

  • by lgleason on 7/23/2017, 5:29 PM

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