Editing Unicode (section)

=== Email ===
{{Main|Unicode and email}}

[[MIME]] defines two different mechanisms for encoding non-ASCII characters in email, depending on whether the characters are in email headers (such as the "Subject:"), or in the text body of the message; in both cases, the original character set is identified as well as a transfer encoding. For email transmission of Unicode, the [[UTF-8]] character set and the [[Base64]] or the [[Quoted-printable]] transfer encoding are recommended, depending on whether much of the message consists of [[ASCII]] characters. The details of the two different mechanisms are specified in the MIME standards and generally are hidden from users of email software.

The IETF has defined<ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 4952
 | title       = Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email
 | author1     = J. Klensin
 | author2     = Y. Ko
 | date        = July 2007
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref><ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 6530
 | title       = Overview and Framework for Internationalized Email
 | author1     = J. Klensin
 | author2     = Y. Ko
 | date        = February 2012
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref> a framework for internationalized email using UTF-8, and has updated<ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 6531
 | title       = SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email
 | author1     = J. Yao
 | author2     = W. Mao
 | date        = February 2012
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref><ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 6532
 | title       = Internationalized Email Headers
 | author1     = A. Yang
 | author2     = S. Steele
 | author3     = N. Freed
 | date        = February 2012
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref><ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 5255
 | title       = Internet Message Access Protocol Internationalization
 | author1     = C. Newman
 | author2     = A. Gulbrandsen
 | author3     = A. Melnikov
 | date        = June 2008
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref><ref>{{cite IETF
 | rfc         = 5721
 | title       = POP3 Support for UTF-8
 | author1     = R. Gellens
 | author2     = C. Newman
 | date        = February 2010
 | access-date = 17 August 2022
}}</ref> several protocols in accordance with that framework.

The adoption of Unicode in email has been very slow.{{citation needed|date=November 2022}} Some East Asian text is still encoded in encodings such as [[ISO-2022]], and some devices, such as mobile phones,{{citation needed|reason=is this outdated?|date=November 2022}} still cannot correctly handle Unicode data. Support has been improving, however. Many major free mail providers such as [[Yahoo! Mail]], [[Gmail]], and [[Outlook.com]] support it.