Still no movement on proper utf8mb4 support - and I think the project has made a
deliberate decision to close this out rather than fix it:
- Zammad 5.3 (2023): MySQL / MariaDB explicitly deprecated in the release
announcements, with PostgreSQL called out as the way forward. - Zammad 6.5 (important announcements section): official data migration path to PostgreSQL for instances still on MySQL/MariaDB. New Minor Release: Zammad 6.5
- Zammad 7.0 (04.03.2026): MySQL / MariaDB support removed - the
mysql2gem is no longer in the 7.0 Gemfile, and the internal ticket “Remove MySQL/MariaDB support” (zammad/zammad#5580) was completed as part of 7.0. Remove MySQL/MariaDB support · Issue #5580 · zammad/zammad · GitHub - Team reasons, spelled out in the follow-up thread: utf8mb4 row-size issues, JSON-handling divergence between MySQL and MariaDB, and overall performance. No more MySQL/MariaDB?
So for anyone still running Zammad on MySQL/MariaDB with utf8mb4 pain: the recommended path is to migrate to PostgreSQL. As one of the earlier posters in this thread already suggested, pgloader has done exactly that job, and it is also the playbook the Zammad team highlights in the 6.5 release notes. If you are evaluating Zammad anew from a MySQL-heavy ecosystem, please factor that migration into your planning - starting on MySQL today is not something the project will carry for you going forward.
Given the team’s clear statement, I don’t see this being picked up any time soon - which is why I would move this request to No implementation planned rather than leaving it in the general queue.