Are email addresses case sensitive?

Way late to this post, but I've got something slightly different to say...

>> "Are email addresses case sensitive?"

Well, "It Depends..." (TM)

Some organizations actually think that's a good idea and their email servers enforce case sensitivity.

So, for those crazy places, "Yes, Emails are case sensitive."

Note: Just because a specification says you can do something does not mean it is a good idea to do so.

The principle of KISS suggests that our systems use case insensitive emails.

Whereas the Robustness principle suggests that we accept case sensitive emails.

Solution:

• Store emails with case sensitivity
• Send emails with case sensitivity
• Perform internal searches with case insensitivity

This would mean that if this email already exists: [email protected]

... and another user comes along and wants to use this email: [email protected]

... that our case insensitive searching logic would return a "That email already exists" error message.

Now, you have a decision to make: Is that solution adequate in your case?

If not, you could charge a convenience fee to those clients that demand support for their case sensitive emails and implement custom logic that allows the [email protected] into your system, even if [email protected] already exists.

In which case your email search/validation logic might look like something this pseudocode:

if (user.paidEmailFee) {
   // case sensitive email
   query = "select * from users where email LIKE ?"
} else {
   // case insensitive email
   query = "select * from users where email ILIKE ?"
}
 

This way, you are mostly enforcing case insensitivity but allowing customers to pay for this support if they are using email systems that support such nonsense.

p.s. ILIKE is a PostgreSQL keyword: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/functions-matching.html

I know this is an old question but I just want to comment here: To any extent email addresses ARE case sensitive, most users would be "very unwise" to actively use an email address that requires capitals. They would soon stop using the address because they'd be missing a lot of their mail. (Unless they have a specific reason to make things difficult, and they expect mail only from specific senders they know.)

That's because imperfect humans as well as imperfect software exist, (Surprise!) which will assume all email is lowercase, and for this reason these humans and software will send messages using a "lower cased version" of the address regardless of how it was provided to them. If the recipient is unable to receive such messages, it won't be long before they notice they're missing a lot, and switch to a lowercase-only email address, or get their server set up to be case-insensitive.

From RFC 5321, section 2.3.11:

The standard mailbox naming convention is defined to be "local-part@domain"; contemporary usage permits a much broader set of applications than simple "user names". Consequently, and due to a long history of problems when intermediate hosts have attempted to optimize transport by modifying them, the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

So yes, the part before the "@" could be case-sensitive, since it is entirely under the control of the host system. In practice though, no widely used mail systems distinguish different addresses based on case.

The part after the @ sign however is the domain and according to RFC 1035, section 3.1,

"Name servers and resolvers must compare [domains] in a case-insensitive manner"

In short, you are safe to treat email addresses as case-insensitive.