5 ms·

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

47 points by Fizzadar 9y ago

Freak_NL 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Why is that important?
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      > 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 9y ago
        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".
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Maybe English is not their first language? In Poland, for example, it's common to use the word "e-mail" when one means "e-mail address", e.g. "give me your e-mail".
true_religion 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  > That cuts you (the user) off from hundreds of millions of people on corporate networks. Arguably an advantage.
  - true_religion 9y ago
    I suppose... until you apply for a job and can't receive a favorable response because they're one of the many Fortune 5000 companies that use Exchange/Outlook somewhere in their infrastructure.
    - flai 9y ago
      Not every one of my email-addresses is used in a business-context.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
      - 9y ago
tyingq 9y ago
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-more-global-email.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-... Microsoft has support in some places, but not others, etc.
- colinbartlett 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    It looks like that has been fixed: https://github.com/charlesthk/python-mailchimp/commit/5a4ed63954aebe0e0f27a680063a8ee27d6efb66 https://github.com/charlesthk/python-mailchimp/commit/5a4ed6...
    - tyingq 9y ago
      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.
Twirrim 9y ago
MailChimps brief article about it: http://kb.mailchimp.com/accounts/management/international-characters-in-mailchimp 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."
jimnotgym 9y ago
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
- user5994461 9y ago
  Never seen an accent in an email. It probably never was possible.
criddell 9y ago
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-spam-lazy-email-marketing-is-killing-our-inboxes https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/17/death-by-...
- twunde 9y ago
  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
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    I suspect they meant that you'd use a check to make sure that you are in receipt of email to the address you want to check; similar to reset your password email, click the link in the email to prove it's your own email address.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        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.
lgleason 9y ago
Mail Chimp is not a great platform. There are better alternatives.

47 points by Fizzadar 9y ago

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 9y ago
Why is that important?
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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 9y ago
      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".
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Maybe English is not their first language? In Poland, for example, it's common to use the word "e-mail" when one means "e-mail address", e.g. "give me your e-mail".

true_religion 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
> That cuts you (the user) off from hundreds of millions of people on corporate networks. Arguably an advantage.
- true_religion 9y ago
  I suppose... until you apply for a job and can't receive a favorable response because they're one of the many Fortune 5000 companies that use Exchange/Outlook somewhere in their infrastructure.
  - flai 9y ago
    Not every one of my email-addresses is used in a business-context.
- tyingq 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago

tyingq 9y ago

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-more-global-email.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-first-step-toward-... Microsoft has support in some places, but not others, etc.

colinbartlett 9y ago
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 9y ago
  It looks like that has been fixed: https://github.com/charlesthk/python-mailchimp/commit/5a4ed63954aebe0e0f27a680063a8ee27d6efb66 https://github.com/charlesthk/python-mailchimp/commit/5a4ed6...
  - tyingq 9y ago
    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.

Twirrim 9y ago

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

jimnotgym 9y ago

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

user5994461 9y ago
Never seen an accent in an email. It probably never was possible.

criddell 9y ago

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

twunde 9y ago
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
- tankenmate 9y ago
  I suspect they meant that you'd use a check to make sure that you are in receipt of email to the address you want to check; similar to reset your password email, click the link in the email to prove it's your own email address.
- tyingq 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.

lgleason 9y ago

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