3 ms·

Ask HN: How common are international (Unicode) email addresses 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

ggm 8y ago
The keywords you might want to search on are "universal acceptance" and "utf-8 and email software" I participated in some work trying to assess availability of complete mail solutions which are utf-8 clean lhs@rhs and it's surprisingly hard to find packages which work for the MS and MTS and MUA side of things. Imap demons for instance which work at scale for large organisations. ICANN has a piece of this, which is where the universal acceptance concept may come from. I work for a pan-national member-structured not-for-profit in the Asia Pacific region with WHOIS requirements. We live in this problem space.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
  >I work for a pan-national member-structured not-for-profit in the Asia Pacific region with WHOIS requirements. We live in this problem space. Cool! So you must have some insight then on approximately how common utf8 characters in email addresses might be, yes? If php7 and html5 forms the world-over aren't even validating utf8 emails correctly, they can't be very widely used imho, even in their use-case regions like Asia Pacific, can they?
  - ggm 8y ago
    They're not common. I'm not sure we quantified things.
sethammons 8y ago
Not common. However, don't bother validating emails in anyway other than attempting to send them. Does it have an at-sign? Decent check. You can get fancy and check MX and A records. Ignore everything before the last at-sign. Yes, last at-sign. A valid email address can have multiple :). Just try send an email to validate it.

ggm 8y ago

The keywords you might want to search on are "universal acceptance" and "utf-8 and email software" I participated in some work trying to assess availability of complete mail solutions which are utf-8 clean lhs@rhs and it's surprisingly hard to find packages which work for the MS and MTS and MUA side of things. Imap demons for instance which work at scale for large organisations. ICANN has a piece of this, which is where the universal acceptance concept may come from. I work for a pan-national member-structured not-for-profit in the Asia Pacific region with WHOIS requirements. We live in this problem space.

flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
>I work for a pan-national member-structured not-for-profit in the Asia Pacific region with WHOIS requirements. We live in this problem space. Cool! So you must have some insight then on approximately how common utf8 characters in email addresses might be, yes? If php7 and html5 forms the world-over aren't even validating utf8 emails correctly, they can't be very widely used imho, even in their use-case regions like Asia Pacific, can they?
- ggm 8y ago
  They're not common. I'm not sure we quantified things.

sethammons 8y ago

Not common. However, don't bother validating emails in anyway other than attempting to send them. Does it have an at-sign? Decent check. You can get fancy and check MX and A records. Ignore everything before the last at-sign. Yes, last at-sign. A valid email address can have multiple :). Just try send an email to validate it.