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 AWS SDK and tried the following test (the 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 AWS 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, are 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.