Special Characters in E-mail Addresses

Does anyone know whether it is possible to use special characters, such as the Sharp S (ß), in e-mail addresses?

 

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I don't think so. The SMTP protocol uses ascii.

 

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But 'ß' is part of ASCII, isn't it?

 

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Not the standard ascii, which only includes the first 128 characters. http://www.asciitable.com/

You might be able to use extended ascii on some servers though.

 

Officialy only 7-bit ASCII (i.e. the lower 128 characters of the ASCII table) are supported. From RFC 2821 :

"The TCP connection supports the transmission of 8-bit bytes. The SMTP data is 7-bit ASCII characters. Each character is transmitted as an 8-bit byte with the high-order bit cleared to zero. Service extensions may modify this rule to permit transmission of full 8-bit data bytes as part of the message body, but not in SMTP commands or responses."

Since the email address for which the message was intended must be sent using a SMTP command, it must consist of 7-bit ASCII characters.

 

Yeah, but you can still use french accents (éêè) in e-mail. I think it just depends on what program your using to send your e-mail. If it's something dating from ARPAnet, sure it might not be able to use the ß, but most modern e-mail programs can.

 

Yup, in the *body* of the e-mail itself anything is supported, hell, nowadays people think it's normal to post html e-mail. But for the e-mail *address* only 7-bit ascii is supported.