Are international UTF-8 e-mail addresses a thing or not?

RFC6530 defines the necessary steps for "international e-mail" (i.e., especially for UTF-8 e-mail addresses). Apparently Google adopted the RFC back in 2014 (source). Still, most validators I find on the web are having trouble with international e-mail addresses to say the least. One very popular contender is HTML5's integrated e-mail validator of type="email" fields, which does NOT support international e-mail addresses at all. So my question is: are international e-mail addresses a thing or is this "dead technology"? We're writing test data generators and are thinking about extending our e-mail address generator but are unsure whether to include international e-mail addresses as well. We could make it a configurable option of course, still, if this technology is actually dead, we are not going to include it.

Apr 4, 2025 - 10:05

RFC6530 defines the necessary steps for "international e-mail" (i.e., especially for UTF-8 e-mail addresses). Apparently Google adopted the RFC back in 2014 (source). Still, most validators I find on the web are having trouble with international e-mail addresses to say the least. One very popular contender is HTML5's integrated e-mail validator of type="email" fields, which does NOT support international e-mail addresses at all.

So my question is: are international e-mail addresses a thing or is this "dead technology"?

We're writing test data generators and are thinking about extending our e-mail address generator but are unsure whether to include international e-mail addresses as well. We could make it a configurable option of course, still, if this technology is actually dead, we are not going to include it.