Unicode and Email

Unicode And Email

Many email clients now offer some support for Unicode in email bodies. Most do not send in Unicode by default, as the reader client might not support it, but as time passes, more and more systems are likely to be set up with fonts capable of displaying the full range of Unicode characters (or at least the set likely to be of interest to the user).

To use Unicode in email subject lines and email addresses two different standards need to be used to retrofit the handling of non-ASCII data to the originally ASCII-only email protocol:

• RFC 2047 provides support for encoding non-ASCII values such as real names and subject lines in email headers
• RFC 3490 provides support for encoding non-ASCII domain names in the Domain Name System