Title: unicode – Make WordPress Core

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#  Tag Archives: unicode

 [  ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/agulbra/) [agulbra](https://profiles.wordpress.org/agulbra/)
7:46 pm _on_ May 22, 2026     
Tags: charset, [email ( 4 )](https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/email/),
unicode   

# 󠀁[Extending Unicode support in email addresses.](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/05/22/extending-unicode-support-in-email-addresses-usernames-and-slugs/)󠁿

Eleven years ago, in [Core-31992](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/31992),
someone proposed allowing non-US-ASCII email address support in WordPress. The software
world has changed considerably since then: internationalized domain names and paths
are uniformly handled in browsers, email systems support the wide range of Unicode
characters as raw UTF-8, and UTF-8 is the only recommended text encoding for interchange
between systems. This means that people are free to use their own names when communicating
with others, whether they are _Jake_, _Klára_, _আরিয়া _, _അമൽ_, or any other name
containing letters outside the A-Z range. Unfortuantely, WordPress has not kept 
up with these changes, and that’s what this post is all about.

This post is a _request for comment _on adding that support. There are a number 
of complications with potentially far-reaching implications.

## TL;DR

 * WordPress’ email sanitization is based on US-ASCII characters and needs to be
   relaxed to allow for valid UTF-8, but this introduces new risks, including but
   not limited to: confusable characters, equivalence through normalization, and
   non-visible characters.
 * Sites whose databases cannot store full UTF-8 may fail to save valid email addresses.
   This could be confusing to the site owner and to people attempting to sign up
   on the site unless properly communicated.
 * Any additional code that assumes emails are encoded as single-byte US-ASCII will
   need updating, specifically because it was always an invariant before that emails
   would not contain multi-byte Unicode characters. Filters may start seeing characters
   they believed were impossible to receive.

If you have experience with email issues, deployDeploy Launching code from a local
development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to 
visitors. email services, or know about certain critical aspects of this proposal,
please share your thoughts here or in [Core-31992](https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/31992).

 [Continue reading →](https://make.wordpress.org/core/2026/05/22/extending-unicode-support-in-email-addresses-usernames-and-slugs/#more-121742)

[#charset](https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/charset/), [#email](https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/email/),
[#unicode](https://make.wordpress.org/core/tag/unicode/)

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