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This is a great reminder that when working with test data for stuff like email delivery, always use example.com (or a few other similar TLDs) and not stuff like
by Lightbody 5y ago
This is a great reminder that when working with test data for stuff like email delivery, always use example.com (or a few other similar TLDs) and not stuff like "test.com" or "acme.com" or "dummyuser.com". I see this all the time by devs and they don't understand the risk and why example.com was put into the standards.
- linuxlizard 5y agoI have a .com domain with 'test' in the name. I was mildly DNS spammed because Microsoft admins would create that thing with test in the name. I'd get 10-20 DNS packets a day. I moved it to an external DNS provider just to give my logs a break.
- mathfailure 5y ago20 packets a day? Phew! So you barely survived the DDoS!
- Uehreka 5y agoAt least you’re not a sysadmin for Contoso, those folks must have their hands full.
- psadauskas 5y agoI always use `myco.example` for testing requests and emails, as well as documentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example It'll never resolve to anything, and makes it really obvious the code is for testing or sample code.
- orev 5y agoNever heard of the .example TLD, so thanks for that. However, an issue I see with it is that it doesn’t look like a domain name. Things that end in ‘.com’ are synonymous with domain names, regardless of how accurate that assumption really is. I think people are just starting to get familiar with these new alternative TLD names, but I can easily see business people not understanding ‘myco.example’, while they would understand ’example.com’.
- tomcam 5y agoNo guarantee an .example TLD won't be created
- magicconch 5y agoThe first line of the linked Wikipedia page states that it will never be created.
- tomcam 5y agoAhem. Thank you.
- renewiltord 5y agoLiterally the standard, my dude. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606#section-2 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606#section-2
- throwawayboise 5y agoStandards can change, but I guess if you allow for that, example.com is no better.
- tomcam 5y agoDoh! Thank you for the correction. I thought I had read that RFC
- tomcam 5y ago
- tdrdt 5y agoExactly this. People heavily underestimate how many domain names are registered. There is a huge chance that you hit a mailbox when you make up an email address.
- throwawayboise 5y agoYep, even if you use a "random" email address like j4i58tujq45uh@foobar.com, they may very well have a "catch all" email account that will receive that mail.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoI have an integration test domain. It's just another domain, so far as my systems are concerned, but it's another domain I own and sign up as a customer for all my services. Rather: I sign it up as a customer on my staging instance, which is a real, public facing instance, that gets no advertising. It's a real domain with functioning... whatever I need to test. Email, DNS, Identity servers, etc.