Umlaut addresses at a glance

Umlaut addresses refer to email addresses that contain umlauts or special characters such as ä, ö, ü, ß, etc.

Domain names are primarily based on international spelling conventions and were not originally intended to include umlauts. For this reason, domain names that replace the umlauts ä, ö, and ü with ae, oe, and ue are still common today.

It is now possible to use umlauts in the domain part of an email address, as these are automatically converted into an ASCII-compatible format called Punycode. Using umlauts in the part of the address before the @ symbol requires additional technical support (known as SMTPUTF8) that not all email providers offer yet.