4 ms·

Ask HN: How common are international emails in the wild?

I'm guessing the answer is "not at all"? Just playing around with setting up a new site from scratch here and I noticed that international email validation is not present in input type=email html forms nor is it in the filter_var php email validation function. Not a single international email listed on Wikipedia's page [0] validates. And in fact, a few of the non international ones do not validate either. Mainly the ones with double quotes in the username. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addresses

snazz 8y ago
I live in an English-speaking country, which obviously clouds my experience to some extent, but in the entire time I’ve been on the Internet, I’ve never seen a Unicode email address anywhere or ever received an email from one. I’m guessing that they would break many systems that don’t expect Unicode in email addresses (which is why they don’t validate). Does anyone know if there’s something like punycode[0] for email addresses? [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bradknowles 8y ago
What do you mean “international emails”? Like, are there people who live outside of whatever country you are in, who also exist and have valid working e-mail addresses? Yes, there are people in the world for whom that is true. Do you mean something about the character set that is used to display their e-mail address in a localized form? If that’s the question you mean, then perhaps you should expand on that, and then ask your question. As it is, your question really doesn’t make any sense at all.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  E.g. иван.сергеев@пример.рф See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addresses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addr... - linked in OP
- NonEUCitizen 8y ago
  Agreed it didn't make any sense. OP, please change title to say "email addresses" instead of just "emails."
  - buboard 8y ago
    and "unicode" instead of international

snazz 8y ago

I live in an English-speaking country, which obviously clouds my experience to some extent, but in the entire time I’ve been on the Internet, I’ve never seen a Unicode email address anywhere or ever received an email from one. I’m guessing that they would break many systems that don’t expect Unicode in email addresses (which is why they don’t validate). Does anyone know if there’s something like punycode[0] for email addresses? [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bradknowles 8y ago

What do you mean “international emails”? Like, are there people who live outside of whatever country you are in, who also exist and have valid working e-mail addresses? Yes, there are people in the world for whom that is true. Do you mean something about the character set that is used to display their e-mail address in a localized form? If that’s the question you mean, then perhaps you should expand on that, and then ask your question. As it is, your question really doesn’t make any sense at all.

quickthrower2 8y ago
E.g. иван.сергеев@пример.рф See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addresses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email#Email_addr... - linked in OP
NonEUCitizen 8y ago
Agreed it didn't make any sense. OP, please change title to say "email addresses" instead of just "emails."
- buboard 8y ago
  and "unicode" instead of international