Email Address Internationalization (EAI) Considerations

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.

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.

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).