TypeError when sending to an umlaut domain

[chschuermann]

One of our older Python 2.7 projects ran into an error when sending a transactional email to a domain containing an umlaut (e.g. "someone@my-umlaut-domäin.com"). Our transmission includes recipient attributes:

sp.transmissions.send(
    recipients=[{
        'address': {
            'name': u'Firstname Lastname',
            'email': u'someone@my-umlaut-domäin.com',
        }
    }],
    template='my-template'
)

The package version 1.1.1 gave us the following error:
At least one valid recipient is required

Updating to the latest release 1.3.2 returned this error:
TypeError: sequence item 0: expected string, dict found

Unicode recipients should be supported since package version 1.0.3. Is there something we miss?

[alexrada]

I'm getting the same error with an unicode email address.

sparkpost/exceptions.py", line 30, in init\n errors='\n'.join(errors)\nTypeError: sequence item 0: expected string, dict found\n", "err_details": "TypeError('sequence item 0: expected string, dict found',)"

[richleland]

Hi @chschuermann @alexrada taking a look at this - sorry for the crazy delay! I'll follow up with findings.

[richleland]

Update - did some debugging - there are two issues here - the unicode chars not working in recipient email addresses, and the improper handling of the error messages. The error issue should be easy to fix up, and I'll continue to investigate the unicode problem.

[richleland]

OK, I've got some info for you @chschuermann @alexrada. Support for SMTPUTF8 is very thin - most receiving MTAs do not accept recipient emails with domains with UTF8 characters. We run stats to check for support periodically and our most recent check showed about 1% support. That said, we do support punycode. There is also built-in support in Python to and you can punycode the domain before submitting to SparkPost, which will be accepted and sent properly.

Following is an example of how you'd pull this off given the domain above:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

from sparkpost import SparkPost

sp = SparkPost()

recipient_domain = u'my-umlaut-domäin.com'.encode("idna")
recipient_email = u'someone@{0}'.format(recipient_domain)

response = sp.transmissions.send(
    recipients=[
        {
            'address': {
                'name': u'Firstname Lastname',
                'email': recipient_email
            }
        }
    ],
    text='Hello there',
    from_email='Issue 134 <test@sp.richleland.com>',
    subject='pyton-sparkpost issue #134',
    campaign='python-sparkpost example',
)

print(response)

Give that a go, and let me know if that solves the issue for you.

[richleland]

I'm going to go ahead and close this out, but feel free to report any further issues related to this.