Email Address Internationalization (EAI) Considerations

Understand the impact of Email Address Internationalization (EAI) on email address length and the number of allowed recipients per email. Review support limitations, best practices, and the changes to the character encoding returned through the API for email fields.

Required Editions

Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: All editions

Support Limitations

EAI email addresses aren’t supported for Marketing Cloud, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot), Einstein Activity Capture, or Salesforce Inbox. Our Account Engagement email address validation vendor currently supports only ASCII characters. So you can’t add, update, or sync a prospect with non-Latin-based characters in their email address in Account Engagement. If emails with EAI recipients are included in the Account Engagement send pipeline, those recipients are dropped from the communication.

Only Use ASCII Email Addresses in the Email From Field

If a receiving Email Service Provider (ESP) or Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) doesn’t support internationalized email, emails sent from an EAI email address bounce. And the emails bounce even if all the recipients are American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) email addresses. Until all ESPs and MTAs support EAI, we recommend that you use only ASCII email addresses for your “from” addresses when sending email from Salesforce. The “from" email address is typically populated from the user account’s email field or an organization-wide email address.

Email Address Length and Storage

Non-Latin-based characters are often wider, requiring extra field space and storage. We support non-Latin-based characters in email addresses up to the current 80-character maximum.

Note Encrypting email can reduce the number of characters allowed per email address by as much as a third.

Number of Recipients Per Email

An EAI email address takes three times more storage on average than an ASCII email address. We addressed the storage per email address, but the TO, CC, and BCC fields on an individual email each still allow up to 4,000 bytes. So using EAI email addresses can reduce the maximum number of recipients per email by as much as a factor of three.

Mixed Address Handling

To maximize the delivery rate for your emails, Salesforce provides options on how to handle emails containing ASCII and EAI email recipient addresses. The default option is to split the email into two emails. We recommend this option because it gives the message the best chance of delivery.

OPTION	BEHAVIOR
Split	Delivery to the ASCII email address recipients succeeds. International emails are delivered successfully as long as the recipient’s ESP and MTA supports EAI. For recipients with an ASCII email address, the “Reply All” action only sends a response to recipients with ASCII email addresses. For recipients with an EAI email address, the “Reply All” action sends a response to all email recipients. If any receiving mail service doesn’t support EAI, the email bounces. If only EAI addresses exist in the TO field, that field can be blank in the split messages. For example, you send an email with only EAI addresses in the TO field and ASCII and EAI addresses in the CC field. When this message is split, the TO field in the split email with only ASCII addresses is blank. Although a blank TO recipient list can look odd in your email client, email standards allow it. If you choose to send email from Salesforce using an EAI email address, selecting this option has no effect. A single email is sent because of the EAI email address in the from field.
Allow	Delivery is only successful to recipients whose ESPs and MTAs support internationalized emails. The “Reply All” action sends a response to all email recipients.

OPTION

BEHAVIOR

Split

Delivery to the ASCII email address recipients succeeds.
International emails are delivered successfully as long as the recipient’s ESP and MTA supports EAI.
For recipients with an ASCII email address, the “Reply All” action only sends a response to recipients with ASCII email addresses.
For recipients with an EAI email address, the “Reply All” action sends a response to all email recipients. If any receiving mail service doesn’t support EAI, the email bounces.
If only EAI addresses exist in the TO field, that field can be blank in the split messages. For example, you send an email with only EAI addresses in the TO field and ASCII and EAI addresses in the CC field. When this message is split, the TO field in the split email with only ASCII addresses is blank. Although a blank TO recipient list can look odd in your email client, email standards allow it.

If you choose to send email from Salesforce using an EAI email address, selecting this option has no effect. A single email is sent because of the EAI email address in the from field.

Allow

Delivery is only successful to recipients whose ESPs and MTAs support internationalized emails.
The “Reply All” action sends a response to all email recipients.

Storage and Display Encoding

With EAI disabled, the data in fields of type email are all stored with ASCII or ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) encoding.

INPUT	DISPLAY	STORAGE	API TYPE RETURNED
ASCII	ASCII	ASCII	ASCII
ACE	ACE	ACE	ACE
Unicode (IDN)	ACE	ACE	ACE
Unicode (EAI)	Invalid email error	N/A	N/A

When you enable EAI, the encoding of the data in email fields changes. Most notably, Unicode (IDN) formatted email addresses entered or updated after EAI is enabled are stored in Unicode format. Unicode (IDN) formatted email addresses stored in email fields before EAI is enabled retain the original encoding type (ACE).

INPUT	DISPLAY	STORAGE	API TYPE RETURNED
ASCII	ASCII	ASCII	ASCII
ACE	ACE	ACE	ACE
Unicode (IDN), entered before EAI is enabled	ACE	ACE	ACE
Unicode (IDN), entered or edited after EAI is enabled	Unicode	Unicode	Unicode
Unicode (IDN with combining characters)	ACE	ACE	ACE
Unicode (EAI)	Unicode	Unicode	Unicode
Unicode (EAI with combining characters)	Unicode@ACE	Unicode@ACE	Unicode@ACE