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Microsoft announced last year that Office 365 users will soon be able to send and receive messages from e-mail addresses of international characters. These “internationalized” e-mail addresses typically uses UTF-8 character set rather than ASCII, allowing names in the Hindi, Russian, Chinese or any other supported language.

Email Address like below are internationalized email addresses :

सौरभ@gmail.com

麥克風@gmail.com

Today, We will find out how to verify if SMTP Server supports internationalized character.

SMTP Server support of  internationalized character

Please make sure that server receiving such messages have SMTPUTF8 lists in their smtp verb.

  • I did telnet to mx endpoint of EOP on TCP 25.
  • Received below response back, Here you can see that SMTPUTF8 is listed there, which means receiving end would be able to receive

On the other hand, I have a local SMTP Server, when i did telnet. I didn’t see SMTPUTF8, hence this server won’t be able to handle internationalized characters.

  • Did telnet to my local server on tcp 25
  • Received below response back, Here you can see that SMTPUTF8 is listed there, which means receiving end would be able to receive noutf

Note : Rest of the email infra of recipient must support and should be able to handle UTF-8 email addresses and message header values.

How to send a manual Test Email of UTF 8

Make sure you verified with above steps that destination server is listing SMTPUTF8 in their smtp verb. Now you can perform telnet and try sending email :-

  • I did telnet to MX endpoint of EOP on TCP 25.
  • Received below response back, Here you can see that SMTPUTF8 is listed there.
  • Here we have to note that mail-from contains a non-ASCII character then specify SMTPUTF8 at the end. This will make sure that encoding is able to respect the non-ASCII character and doesn’t discard it.abc1.PNG

 

You can read these RFC for more info on internationalized email addresses.

I will put more examples in next articles and explain in detail, Thank you for reading !