There is a lot of confusion over whether email addresses are case sensitive or not. Some say they are, while others claim that they aren’t. So, who is right? In this article we’ll take a look into whether email addresses are case sensitive or case insensitive.
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Internationalization
Originally, email addresses could only be registered using the letters of the Latin alphabet, numbers, and a limited set of special ASCII characters. However, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has subsequently developed rules and standards for inclusion of international characters.
RFC6530 was the first to include and regulate the use of international characters. RFC6531 expanded on the rules and standards. Subsequently, the rules and standards were updated through RFC6532 and RFC6533.
You can now register an email address using a wide range of alphabets, characters, and scripts. Some of the most widely used include Latin characters with diacritics, Greek alphabet, Traditional Chinese characters, Japanese characters (hiragana, katakana, and kanji), Cyrillic alphabet, several Indian scripts, as well as a range of others.
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The inclusion of and compatibility with international email addresses varies from provider to provider. Even some of the biggest providers are not fully compatible with international addresses. For example, Google allows you to send an email to an international address but it doesn’t allow you to create one. Outlook 2016 has a similar functionality.
Conclusion
Unlike the domain name part, the local part of an email address is case sensitive. That being said, many email providers choose to ignore the case sensitivity of the local part for practical reasons and encourage people to create emails with lower case characters only.
2 thoughts on “Are Emails Case Sensitive?”
Jim Santoro says:
July 26, 2019 at 8:05 am
I used to think expressing email addresses in upper and lower case was wonderful. They were easier to decipher, easier to remember and helped to avoid some awkward mashups of first initial+last name.But, most of the world doesn’t understand they’re functional either way. And if your customers, friends, etc., think they need to preserve the uc/lc format when they enter the email address (especially on a device), you’ve caused more trouble and delay.
Andrea says:
I always wanted to know this. I usually just keep it all lower case and even ignore the person if they tell me “capital A” and continue. Now I know that I should pay better attention.
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Categories: Mail