an é (e with accent) can also be written as e+\u0301. the first form is NFC,
the second NFD. when logging in, we transform usernames (email addresses) to
NFC. so both forms will be accepted. if a client is using NFD, they can log
in too.
for passwords, we apply the PRECIS "opaquestring", which (despite the name)
transforms the value too: unicode spaces are replaced with ascii spaces. the
string is also normalized to NFC. PRECIS may reject confusing passwords when
you set a password.
to get the security benefits (detecting mitm attempts), explicitly configure
clients to use a scram plus variant, e.g. scram-sha-256-plus. unfortunately,
not many clients support it yet.
imapserver scram plus support seems to work with the latest imtest (imap test
client) from cyrus-sasl. no success yet with mutt (with gsasl) though.
the idea is that clients may not support SCRAM-SHA-256, but may support
SCRAM-SHA-1. if they do support the 256 variant, they'll use it.
unfortunately, thunderbird does not support scram-sha-1 either.