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by gwright 2096 days ago
I learned about .invalid last year and had an immediate use for it where we needed a syntactically valid email to match a schema but didn't want it to be deliverable.

I discovered quickly that some other systems wouldn't accept the placeholder emails such as notused@email.invalid. Too many systems try to be too smart about the syntax of emails (+ subaddressing is another minefield).

Had to go back to using something like notused@invalid.toplevel.com

1 comments

> + subaddressing is another minefield

I'm still not sure if this is because the developers are incompetent and don't understand that they can just used an established standard instead of rolling their own janky parser, or if it's because they just don't want to let the user tell who had their databases leaked or sold their email to a spam list.

I used to think the former because there's so many different solutions to the latter that don't involve actively annoying the people you're trying to extract money from, but I'm starting to think that it's a little from column A and a little from column B.