Does Amazon SES support UTF-8 email addresses?

Question

I tried to find details on this but was unable to find any confirmation. I'm using the PHP SDK and tried the following test (email below is an example but gmail supports UTF-8 characters in emails):

• Send an email with SES to myemail+✖@gmail.com

I actually sent the '✖' as is using the PHP SDK and looking at the query it got encoded (URL) in the body of the POST request:

Destination.ToAddresses.member.1=myemail%2B%E2%9C%96%40gmail.com

Here is what I got from the SES response:

<ErrorResponse xmlns="http://ses.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-12-01/">
  <Error>
    <Type>Sender</Type>
    <Code>InvalidParameterValue</Code>
    <Message>Local address contains control or whitespace</Message>
  </Error>
  <RequestId>f28c2325-5c09-11e6-9156-ef3e33b8e223</RequestId>
</ErrorResponse>

Did I miss something or this is not supported? and if it isn't, is there plans to support it?

Answer 1

As stated in the latest Developer Guide of Amazon SES, regarding limits, Amazon SES is using standard RFC-822 email addresses.

The RFC-822 basically limits the character repertoire to 7-bit ASCII strings. MIME added supports for 8-bit character sets in the body and some specific header fields but full internationalization of email addresses and in all header fields with Unicode support, removal of the ASCII repertoire limitation and UTF-8 charset are part of another standard: RFC-6352.

Until Amazon SES change its accepted header fields from RFC-822 to RFC-6532 that allows email addresses to use non-ASCII characters, you won't be able to use UTF-8 email addresses with Amazon SES.

Answer 2

To add to HiDeo's answer, I also got official confirmation from Amazon that this feature is not currently supported and has been forwarded to the SES team for consideration:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=236854

Original answer from Amazon:

Hello,

Thank you for this feature request! I've forwarded it to the SES team for consideration. Unfortunately you won't hear anything back from this, but please keep an eye on the What's New blog at https://aws.amazon.com/new for any updates!

Regards,

Matt W.