Definition
Email Address Internationalization is a Setup feature that enables support for internationalized email addresses containing non-ASCII characters (such as accented letters, Chinese characters, or Cyrillic script) in the local part or domain of an email address. This ensures Salesforce can send and receive emails using international domain names.
Real-World Example
The admin at GlobalTech enables Email Address Internationalization to support their Japanese office, where some employees have email addresses with kanji characters in the domain name. After enabling the feature, users with internationalized email addresses can send and receive emails through Salesforce without encountering character encoding errors.
Why Email Address Internationalization Matters
Email Address Internationalization solves a critical gap in global organizations where employees, partners, or customers use non-ASCII characters in their email addresses. As businesses expand internationally, email addresses containing accented Latin characters, Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, Arabic script, or Cyrillic letters become commonplace. Without this feature enabled, Salesforce would reject or corrupt these addresses, causing failed email deliveries, broken workflows, and a poor experience for international users who cannot use their native-language email addresses.
As an org scales to serve multiple regions and languages, Email Address Internationalization becomes essential for maintaining seamless communication. Organizations operating in Asia, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East will find that a significant portion of their contacts and leads have internationalized email addresses. Failing to enable this feature leads to bounced emails, incomplete contact records, and broken automation that depends on valid email fields. It also creates compliance risks in regions where businesses are expected to support local-language digital communication.
How Organizations Use Email Address Internationalization
- Sakura Technologies — Sakura Technologies is a Tokyo-based SaaS company with 200 employees whose corporate email addresses use a Japanese domain name containing kanji characters. After enabling Email Address Internationalization, all employees can use their official company email addresses as their Salesforce user emails, and automated case notifications reach customers using similar internationalized addresses without encoding errors.
- EuroConnect GmbH — EuroConnect GmbH operates across 15 European countries and discovered that 12% of their lead records had email addresses with accented characters like umlauts and cedillas. After enabling this feature, their marketing automation flows stopped skipping these leads, recovering an estimated 3,400 previously unreachable contacts for their Q3 email campaign.
- CyrillicBank Financial — CyrillicBank Financial serves clients across Russia and Eastern Europe where Cyrillic-script email addresses are becoming more common under new internationalized domain name standards. By enabling Email Address Internationalization, their service team can properly log and respond to support emails from clients using native-script addresses, eliminating the need to ask clients for alternate ASCII-only email accounts.