I suspect this has been asked and answered before but I can't find it. Email addresses containing non-ASCII characters are now legal as far as SMTP is concerned but ISPConfig 3 does not (yet) support that. Is this correct? If it does, how does one enable that support? I tried to create "secré[email protected]" but ISPConfig says no
I don't think this makes any sense, even if it might be that Unicode characters are now allowed in mail addresses. There are so many people that wouldn't even be able to write emails to such addresses either due to missing Unicode support in mail clients or just because the characters are missing on the keyboard. I don't think we will or should allow Unicode in mail addresses inside ISPConfig.
Whilst the comment about keyboards and clients may be true in English-speaking countries, everywhere else it's totally untrue. For example, I live in France and many keyboards here are AZERTY, not QWERTY, and virtually all have accented characters which are heavily used. I routinely receive and send emails using such characters with the email being UTF8-encoded. This is a growing trend internationally and sooner or later I think ISPConfig will have to catch up. I suspect there may be few ISPConfig users in China but hat country has (unsurprisingly) almost totally gone over to UTF8 email for both text and headers. Others will follow.
There is a difference between UTF-8 content in emails in general and UTF-8 email addresses. Addresses using special characters do not make any sense, while contents and subject do, of course.
Yes, I understand the difference and until recently I'd have agreed... but but the world is going over to UTF-8 addresses (and, come to that, UTF in other header fields but, importantly, not the field names themselves! Check out RFCs 6531 and 6532. You can now get UTF-8 domain names, e.g. öko.de. BTW, both Thunderbird and MS outlook support UTF8 domain names and email addresses.
Perhaps it is possible to write any UTF character on my keyboard, but I am sure there are lots of characters used in other languages that I do not know how to type from my keyboard. Can you write åÅ øØ ß æÆ œŒ ôÖ ?
Some of those I can, if I put my keyboard in the appropriate language. But that is not the point: Neither you nor I need to be able to do that; the point is that there are people in other countries who can and who do this and they have keyboards and OSs set up to do so. We can't assume that what we do is the only way for the whole world (Yes, I know that sounds odd coming from an Englishman )
I agree to @Croydon and @Taleman that it's a bad idea to use UTF-8 characters in email addresses. Not everything that is possible makes sense to do so. The problem is that your customers might not understand the consequences when they choose a native character in email addresses, they will just complain to their ISP later when their mails get lost or rejected or when people call them that they do not understand how to type in the address they found on their business card. I would never have the idea to create an address like mü[email protected] here in Germany. Or try to type in (not copy) the address ı[email protected] (no, it's not info@ or Info@ or lnfo@). But we'll probably add an option to allow such characters in future in ISPConfig.
No and there are currently no plans to implement this. if you want to use it, then you'll have to modify the source code and change the field validators in the form files of the email fields.
