There is no official list of email services that treat email addresses as case-sensitive and any that still do are outdated and likely to be rarely used. The five major services (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) all treat addresses as case-insensitive. How do email services handle different cases? " ( ), : are all also allowed, but with restrictions, and since many email servers don’t read them (Gmail addresses, for instance) best practice is to not use these special characters as they can make an email address harder to remember. You can’t have two periods in a row (e.g. The exception to the above is if quotation marks are used is acceptable) Periods (or full stops) can’t be used as the first or last letter in an email address (such as or ) There are a few other rules around using special characters in an email address: ) and underscores ( _ ) are most common, but the following special characters can also be used: Only certain special characters can be used in email addresses. To maintain a professional appearance, you may wish to avoid using numerals in place of letters, such as Can you use special characters in an email address? Some larger companies use numbers to delineate between different staff members with the same name (for example, there might be multiple Sarahs at an organization), though best practice would generally be to follow one of these naming conventions: However, numbers are uncommon in the professional context. Yes, numbers are fair game in email addresses. Still, if you’re going to create a mail address with international letters, it may be worth owning a second using only the Latin alphabet.įor instance, for you might also create and direct it to the same mailbox, so you can still receive emails if senders forget the diacritic. Luckily, you aren’t likely to come across many outdated servers because most people use major clients like Gmail and Outlook. Outdated RFC 5322 servers won’t be able to handle such addresses. Traditional Chinese characters: alphabet with diacritics: characters: alphabet: characters: characters: it is worth noting that not all email servers will be compliant with RFC 6530. RFC 6530 allows for the following types of international symbols: Can you use international symbols in an email address? There’s more to email addresses than just case sensitivity, however. In light of this information, the best practice is to stick to lowercase characters when choosing a new email address to avoid any potential problems. Virtually every major provider ignores capitalization. It’s really only outdated email servers that use this approach. In practice, though, this rarely happens. For example, and would direct to different inboxes. Therefore, theoretically, there may be some servers containing two separate mailboxes for different capitalizations. The latest version of RFC 5336, an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) extension, states that the first part of an email address (the unique address) can be case-sensitive. Over the last 50 or so years, this set of rules (known as Request for Comments, or RFC) has been revised and updated many times. With your unique address (the first part of your email, also known as the local part), things get a little more complicated.įor emails to be sent and received effectively between the various email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), every email company needs to adhere to the same email protocol. If you type GMAIL.COM instead of into your browser, your email will end up in the same place.įile Transfer Protocols (FTP) ignores capitalization in domain names and will send your email to the correct mailbox regardless. The domain part of the email address is entirely case insensitive, meaning capitals don’t make a difference, ever. Each email address is a combination of two different parts: That’s because it is technically possible (though not common) for an uppercase and a lowercase email address to direct to two different mailboxes. You may have noticed we said that the simple answer is no when asking does capitalization matter in email addresses. That means that all of these email accounts will go to the same place: They see uppercase and lowercase letters as identical. That’s because modern mail servers essentially ignore capital letters. They aren’t case-sensitive, unlike passwords. Capitals don’t really matter in email addresses. If you’re wondering, “do capital letters matter in email addresses?”, the simple answer here is no.
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