* Addresses can have accented or other foreign characters.
I ordered a package to "Fäkéstreet", but it arrived addressed to "Fäkéstreet", luckily the postman was smart enough to decipher it.
I have also run into the address length issue, even thou my address is only 54 characters long.
For instance, the "unicode snowman" is because MSIE 5-8 will refuse to send a form as UTF-8 (completely ignoring `accept-charset`) if it can encode everything to Latin-1. Conversedly, most browsers will default to UTF-8 (but I believe normalization may vary). If the system was built in the early 00s and only tested in MSIE, it might well expect all input data as latin-1 (because that seemed to work at the time) and crap out when UTF-8 comes in.
to convince IE that it's supposed to be sending UTF-8, not latin1 (And so the site can recognize if the input was likely mangled.