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Error when adding email with UTF-8 characters as a member of a list

A
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I’m trying to add some amount of members to a list created in my Klaviyo account. Everything works nicely for emails that has only ASCII characters (like george.washington@klaviyo.com). However if email contains unicode characters (as example trøst@somedomain.dk or привет@gmail.com), I’m getting following validation error: “<email> is not a valid email.”.

Tried to add members both using API endpoint (https://developers.klaviyo.com/en/reference/add-members) and using UI (Lists & Segments → Manage List → Import Contacts). Same behaviour.

Unicode characters are considered a valid part of email since 2012 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6531).

Can I ask about the way to overcome this problem?

Thanks in advance!

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Best answer by Taylor Tarpley 2 June 2022, 23:56

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Taylor Tarpley
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Hi @Alex Mazur, 

 

Welcome to the Community! Happy to help and sorry to hear about the issues you’re facing!

 

We do accept unicode in email as long as it’s utf-8 encoded. Whenever you’re encountering an issue your call being rejected, I would take these steps to better diagnose and solve what might be happening here:

  1. Verify that the JSON is valid. You can check http://jslint.com/ to verify that the payload you’re sending is formatted correctly. 
  2. Ensure that your base64-encoded string is also url-encoded.
  3. Cross-reference your request with the examples we have in our Track API documentation. One common mistake is the private api key is used in the request when the public api key is required or vice versa. In this case, the request will return a body of 0.

Additionally, I’d recommend taking a look at these posts from others others users in the Community on a similar topic to gain more insight! 

 

Thanks for your participation in the Community! 

-Taylor 

A
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Hi Taylor,

Thanks a lot for the quick answer!

However I still think that something is not working here. The points you mentioned could be valuable if the problem existed only when using API. But I’m experiencing the same issues when doing this procedure though Klaviyo website. 

Simple test case:

  1. Go to List & Segments tab
  2. Select some list
  3. Click Manage List → Import contacts
  4. Upload CSV file with the following content: 

Email

jørgen@gmail.com

 

After upload completed successfully at the bottom I see 0 / 1 records imported.

This confirms that something is wrong on the side of the API implementation. And the problem is in unicode characters, because if we switch email to jorgen@gmail.com everything works.

 

Taylor Tarpley
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Userlevel 7
Badge +60

Hi there @Alex Mazur 

 

After confirming with more specialist on the subject, I found what was going on here! While we can’t accept unicode characters at this time in email, we do support these characters in a user’s name and property fields. Additionally, I’m more than happy to suggest this as a feature request on your behalf as well!

 

-Taylor 

A
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@Taylor Tarpley Has a feature request been raised for this already? I’m having similar issues with emails containing unicode characters and I’m seeing more and more of these lately, especially for specific markets with accent characters in the emails (France).

J
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@Taylor Tarpley We would also very much like this feature, we have a fairly large number of users this affects.

K

We also need this. We have customers with æ, ø, and å in their email addresses.

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