Why can't you send email to a Chinese address?
By @edent
· chinese email i18n unicode · 4 comments · 450 words · read ~4,968 times.
We all know what an email address looks like and how to validate them, right?
A few years ago I got the Chinese domain name 莎士比亚.org. You can browse to it, link to it, and send email to it. Or can you?
When I tried two years ago, none of the major email providers supported sending to non-ASCII email addresses.
Today, I tried again with six of the big "Western" webmail providers. How did they do?
Show Me The Data!
I tested by trying to send an email to test@莎士比亚.org and the Punycode representation test@xn--jlq54w7ypemw.org
| test@莎士比亚.org | test@xn--jlq54w7ypemw.org | |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail | ✔ | ✔ |
| Outlook | ✔ | ✔ |
| Yahoo | ❌ | ❌ |
| iCloud | ❌ | ✔ |
| OWA | ❌ | ✔ |
| FastMail | ✔ ⭐ | ✔ |
Winners!
Both Gmail and Outlook failed the last time I tried them - I'm very pleased to say that both of them now support sending to Chinese addresses.
One strange thing to note, when looking through Outlook's message details, I found this example of Mojibake. 
Losers!
Yahoo
The biggest loser is Yahoo. Very strange considering Jerry Yang, their founder, is Taiwanese-American. Even stranger given Yahoo's continued dealings with China.
The Yahoo webmail portal simply wouldn't let me send to a Chinese domain name.
The Punycode representation appeared to send but immediately failed.
iCloud
Apple's much-vaunted "It Just Works" philosophy obviously doesn't extend to International email addresses. It accepted the Punycode but gave this delightful error message on the Chinese domain.
OWA
Microsoft's Outlook Web Access got very confused and tried to look up the email address in the local directory.
Errr?
⭐ FastMail
Lots of people recommended that I try Fastmail - it really didn't like the look of the Chinese domain and painted it with a red error colour. That said, it sent the email without further complaint.
What about a Chinese Local-Part?
Email is a venerable protocol. That's a polite way of saying it is old and outdated. The local-part of the email address (test@) is generally restricted to a handful of 7 Bit ASCII characters. None of the email providers I tried would let me sign up with a Chinese name. So no 你好@yahoo.com for me!
But what happens if you're foolish enough to try to send an email to 你好@莎士比亚.org?
Well you'll probably get this error message:
In 2012, RFC 6531 defined how International Email Addresses should work. Over four years later and support is still not widespread.
It's 2016 and the majority of the world can't send an email to their preferred name.
你好 Terence! Interesting experiment. You would think that with China being such a big market they would get their act together and make email that actually works with Chinese characters. Is this the same problem with Japanese or Korean?
Terence Eden says:
谢谢！It is a problem with all non-ASCII characters.
Terence - There is now an email service that offers and supports internationalized email addresses in 12 languages, including Chinese. See http://datamail.in or http://电邮.在线
This has all happened recently. I registered the Chinese email 小山@电邮.在线 with DataMail. I have successfully exchanged emails between my Chinese DataMail address and my ASCII gmail address. I have had this email address for less than 2 weeks.
Additional info at https://schappo.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/chinese-email-address.html
André Schappo
Steven Cox says:
Andre, I have a friend IN China that is trying to get an email address so we may communicate. She seems to be having trouble doing so. I was wondering if you might be able to help us solve this problem. Anything kind of information will be helpful to us. And will be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Steven Cox