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Dotless Domains
- sebmellen 1y agoTemporarily rate limited?
- 90s_dev 1y agoAhh, I actually ran into this question, at least indirectly, about a month ago! I was writing an email validator for my project which I'm so excited to announce soon. And my research (some stackoverflow answers) suggested that, yeah, you can have "a@b" as a valid email, as long as there's a one-letter TLD that can have MX records. Which it seems there can be! So my email validator is essentially just /^.{1,}@.{1,}$/ ... yay.
- Dylan16807 1y ago{1,} is just an awkward way of saying + isn't it?
- qaisjp 1y agoout of curiosity, why are you trying to validate emails?
- 90s_dev 1y agoJust a base level regex before sending emails, to avoid some errors sending to non-email addresses and logging otherwise unnecessary errors.
- bch 1y agoDoes this block things like the unconventional Google-filing trick of: myemail+90sdev@gmail.com which gives me the “90sdev” tag for my emails, which still go squarely into my “myemail@gmail.com” address? I don’t know what the best route is, but I’ve certainly run into bad validators that block things that otherwise work, and that’s annoying. It seems to me the best thing might be to have a user twice input their address, then have the next step/confirmation done via email.
- 90s_dev 1y agoI don't do blocking or differentiating. Emails are literal, for better or worse.
- esperent 1y ago> bad validators Possibly these validators are working exactly as intended and don't want you to know which service sold your email to spammers. Then again maybe spammers are smart enough to strip of the + from email lists they purchase.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThe latter was motivation to get my own domain so I can have unlimited unique addresses with a wildcard entry.
- genewitch 1y agoI never get spam that makes it through the default filter, so I am unsure if this works, but I do get zero spam in general since switching off gmail. I like giving silly businesses that ask for my email their business name @ my domain. Most of the time they're too disinterested to notice. Oil change places always notice for some reason. I'll look through my spam foldsr tomorrow and see who's been naughty.
- rendx 1y ago> unconventional Google-filing trick Documented as "subadressing" in RFC 5233, and the default for both sendmail and postfix, amongst others. As such, often 'accidentially' supported by many mail providers even when undocumented. Google didn't introduce them, nor are they 'unconventional'. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5233
- bch 1y agoTIL
- esperent 1y agoThe best you can hope to do is reduce a small class out of possible errors. But you'll never get a test that can prevent errors like name@gnail.com, name@gmaip.com, nane@gmail.com etc. So is it really worth doing any checks at all? I have a .blue email address and it's amazing how many sites still won't accept it. I keep a spare Gmail account for these.
- 90s_dev 1y agoIn other words, /^.+?@.+$/ is a user-friendly reminder that you forgot the @ sign or something. That's all.
- qingcharles 1y ago.blue is 11 years old and still has issues. Same with several of the gtlds I have. I had an argument with a major backend email provider recently who refused to open an account for me as my gtld wasn't "valid." (they backed down eventually and fixed their code) I keep a Gmail for the same reason. I tried to add a .wiki link to a Reddit profile recently and their filters also say that domain is invalid.
- jjani 1y ago> I tried to add a .wiki link to a Reddit profile recently and their filters also say that domain is invalid. That's absurd, there's a .wiki that's almost definitely in the top 20 most visited websites in Korea, if not higher.
- HeliumHydride 1y agoThere's also minecraft.wiki.
- arp242 1y ago> So is it really worth doing any checks at all? People accidentally typing their name in the email field, stuff like that. I've done that. The problems with your .blue is obviously completely unrelated to the "email.contains('@')" check the poster is doing.
- qingcharles 1y agoDoes your regex support emoji usernames and domains? (both of which are in use, e.g. https://mailoji.com/ https://mailoji.com/)
- bigstrat2003 1y agoThat is officially the most cursed thing I've read all week. People really do love to do bizarre things just for the hell of it sometimes.
- 90s_dev 1y agoMy project doesn't even support emojis or unicode. In context, it's not an issue.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoBoth parts are limited to 7-bit ASCII or a subset thereof. Emojis have to be in punycode. You could theoretically use UTF-7 for the local-part but nothing supports it in practice.
- qingcharles 1y agoThat's the spec, for sure! The domains are converted to punycode, but the usernames? I have no idea what happens to them. My tests showed some providers delivered them, some didn't. I'm sure there are a bunch of people out there using accented characters and CJK etc in their usernames and wondering why it's not going so well...
- gerdesj 1y agoI don't know if it is still required but hostnames used to require a minimum of two chars and the first shalt not be an integer. Given that DNS does not put a proper boundary on host/domain, that might extend to your top level ... thingie. However, there is absolutely no technical reason that I can think of that precludes u@x. In the end DNS query -> DNS answer. Given that say, PowerDNS has LUA built in, I can make it respond with "my little pony's stable is in {random_country}" - to A record requests, which might make the requester a little queasy! Bugger standards, they are so 1990s!
- esperent 1y agothe first shalt not be an integer I recently came across the 3.ie domain so I guess that's more of a guideline than rule.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoI believe that the rule has been deprecated due to better parsing. In the mid-90s, 3M was a customer of the ISP I worked for. Unable to procure the domain name “3m.com” they settled for the alternate “mmm.com”: mildly hilarious considering their lines of business.
- leslielurker 1y agoFunny to see mmm.com still works, but it loads up the 3M site without its stylesheet and shows a 404 page. I guess the redirect has been forgotten about at some point.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoYou should know there is a standard regular expression for validating email addresses mentioned in an RFC.
- 38 1y agohttps://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/input/email https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elemen...
- 90s_dev 1y agoMy site doesn't use HTML so that's not gonna help here.
- jph00 1y agoLast time I checked the RFC the bit before the '@' can actually be empty. And the root zone is just '.', but we generally can leave off the trailing dot in domain names. So I believe '@' on its own is a valid email address. Many years ago I managed to get a cctld owner to point their tld MX records at my smtp server, modified postfix to allow empty usernames (even although the RFC allows them, postfix didn't), and successfully had someone send me email to '@tld', in order to win a bet. :) (And it was a 2-letter tld.)
- 90s_dev 1y ago> So I believe '@' on its own is a valid email address. Then the owner of "@" cannot use my site. I'm fine with that.
- 1718627440 1y agoBut that would fail on the valid email "alice".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tech234a 1y agoSimilarly, browsers also accept IP addresses in decimal form, for example http://16843009 http://16843009 for 1.1.1.1
- ryao 1y agoThey will accept IPv4 addresses in IPv6 addresses too: http://[::ffff:1.1.1.1]/ http://[::ffff:1.1.1.1]/ Sadly, cloudflare does not.
- esperent 1y agoWhat's decimal form (base ten?) and why is that 16843009 the decimal form of 1.1.1.1?
- itsgrimetime 1y ago00000001 00000001 00000001 00000001 = 16843009 in base 10 (concatenate each dot-separated 8bit number as one big base 10)
- phanimahesh 1y agoIP addresses are 4 bytes, each in the range 0-255. In binary bits xyz would be equivalent to decimal x2^2+y2+z. Similarly, bytes abc would be equivalent to decimal a256^2+b256+c. IP address p.q.r.s is decimal p256^3+q256^2+r*256+s.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
- tzury 1y agoAll domains including TLDs are sub domains of “.” That’s why there is a trailing dot you see in NS records for example.
- jfengel 1y agoOh. Thank you. I had wondered.
- Salgat 1y agoSeems Chrome also adds the dot at the end in the address bar.
- stackskipton 1y agoTrailing dot is complete record, don't add any search domains onto it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_domain) It's why NS records should have trailing dot in return to prevent unexpected lookup behavior. Technically you can put just hostname for CNAME record. Obviously, any clients that don't have that domain as search domain will fail but for internal domain, you could do it.
- mesrik 1y agoAFAIK calling DNS root the "." is quite recent phenomenon. I'm fairly old guy who did work with DNS about 35 years before retirement and what I recall from the beginning when I was reading my first copy of DNS and BIND somewhat quite soon it came out -92 I think the second chapter which describes DNS root "A null (zero-length" was already there. So a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) well known www.google.com the would be www.google.com."" where between the quotation denotes where the DNS root is shown. However, resolvers don't recognise that syntax. Don't be fooled by $ host www.google.com."" www.google.com has address 216.58.209.164 www.google.com has IPv6 address 2a00:1450:4026:802::2004 from the shell as it removes those double quotes. Using single quotes around shows how that fails and you can check it easily. $ host 'www.google.com.""' Host www.google.com."" not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) The way I learned to understand it the dot in DNS name is (it signifies) the DNS-tree separator, not part of the DNS name. A bit like in some languages (Pascal) use semicolon (;) a sentence separator not an end of sentence like it's in C and many it's practise adopted later. OK, here's an excerpt from DNS and BIND by Cricket Liu & Paul Albitz, O'Reilly ISBN 0-596-10057-6, Fifth Edition 2006 book which I still have a printed copy in my shelf and shows what I'm referring above. Chapter 2: How Does DNS Work, page 12, text after Figure 2-1 they write: "Domain Names Each node in the tree has a text label (without dots) that can be up to 63 characters long. A null (zero-length) label is reserved for the root. The full domain name of any node in the tree is the sequence of labels on the path from that node to the root. Domain names are always read from the node toward the root ("up" the tree), with dots separating the names in the path. If the root node's label actually appears in a node's domain name, the name looks as though it ends in a dot, as in "www.oreilly.com." (It actually ends with a dot—the separator—and the root's null label.) When the root node's label appears by itself, it is written as a single dot, "", for convenience. Consequently, some software interprets a trailing dot in a domain name to indicate that the domain name is absolute. An absolute domain name is written relative to the root and unambiguously specifies a node's location in the hierarchy. An absolute domain name is also referred to as a fully qualified domain name, often abbreviated FQDN. Names without trailing dots are sometimes interpreted as relative to some domain name other than the root, just as directory names without a leading slash are often interpreted as relative to the current directory. ... " I don't have old book copies any more, I've just this one with me.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FlamingMoe 1y agoI think this post is trending because of a comment on the announcement about the new Pope, where someone pointed out the redundancy in the vatican.va domain.
- rat87 1y ago> There 86 domains names starting with "www" in the .va zone,[6] with many more email-only subdomains. https://www.vatican.va/siti_va/index_va_en.htm https://www.vatican.va/siti_va/index_va_en.htm
- 90s_dev 1y agoYep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949769
- AStonesThrow 1y agoThe vatican.va domain has long been an outlier for not operating a web server at that shortened address. They insist on using the “www.vatican.va” only, and my browser’s autocomplete history reflects this.
- pelagicAustral 1y agoThis is such a beautiful thing, it gets you in the head as much as in the heart... alas, probably nobody else feels this way about it...
- pimlottc 1y agoThey might as well then just use www.va!
- AStonesThrow 1y agoWell I suppose they could. But as we've seen, there are plenty of 2nd level domains under .va, and in fact, many if not most of those, especially vatican.va, actually refer to the Holy See. It's very common and understandable for folks to conflate the Holy See with the Vatican, but they are distinct entities with two different functions and purposes. If we're discussing the administration/governance of the Church and the organs which make up the Roman Curia, then we're definitely looking at the Holy See. It's the Holy See, not the Vatican, which is a Permanent Observer to the U.N. But again, if we're looking at any sort of physical presence, it's the Vatican City State. The actual territory that's an enclave and microstate is the Vatican. It's where people live, work, and worship. "The Vatican" is the entity selected for the ".va" ccTLD simply because of the way the rest of the world works. But only a few of those 2nd level domains can properly be considered more "Vatican" than "Holy See".
- nulbyte 1y ago> According to ICANN's SSAC,[1] SMTP requires at least two labels... ICANN does not define SMTP, and the "relevant quote" from SSAC in the article footnotes mentions nothing about it, either. In fact, RFC5321 makes explicit reference to the possibility of an email address using a TLD as the domain in section 2.3.5.
- qingcharles 1y agoI've known people back in the 90s with user@tld domains, and they were definitely sending and receiving mail. So, even if it wasn't spec-compliant it certainly got through all the early mail relays. I mean.. you can use emoji domains right now. They work most places for email. The part I found didn't work so well is emoji usernames on emoji domains. That has poor deliverability.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Joker_vD 1y ago> you can use emoji domains right now ICANN, by the way, heavily discourages such domain names, even though it can't actually prohibit them: yes, RFC 5892 explicitly prohibits emoji code points in internationalized domain names but so what? If registrars allow (and many acually do allow) registration of such names that only means that they violate some RFC and they already violate quite a lot of them. Who cares! Just pay the money and we will delegate you whatever names you want.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rzzzt 1y agoI'd think/hope the Punycode representation is actually registered in these cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain
- pas 1y ago
- vzaliva 1y agoI knew someone who had email ??@ua (two letters masked for priivay) which might have been one of the shortest email addresses in the world. Unfortunately it was not very useful as most email systems failed to recognize it as a valid email address. :(
- codethief 1y ago> two letters masked for priivay You do realize there are not that many two-letter combinations…? :)
- Dylan16807 1y agoThat doesn't impact the privacy much. Much like being able to guess every phone number.
- codethief 1y agoI would assume there are not that many valid email addresses of the form ??@ua, so narrowing things down is a matter of sending out 26² emails and waiting for the mailer daemon to respond.
- Dylan16807 1y agoYou can't do that if the address doesn't exist any more. Also I think I blame the daemon in that situation.
- thequux 1y agoI know that Len Sassaman had r@ai for quite some time, so your friend didn't have the absolute shortest address. Still a cool one though
- hirsin 1y agoAt one point we were looking at moving a bunch of separate domains under a single dotless domain, due to the threatened death of 3p cookies, so that cookies could be dropped directly onto the cctld (think "you're logged into the entire TLD"). As the owners of the cctld it felt like a neat use that technically could work but ICANN and other groups are explicitly against that. To me it felt very AOL keyword
- mattl 1y agoI think done well, AOL keywords are actually a good idea. They could also cut down on the fraudulent websites out there. Not sure how to fully implement it but given the safe browsing features already implemented in web browsers it could perhaps be part of that. Or a new TLD.
- hirsin 1y agoI imagine they'd have all the lovely problems of both EV certs (sure, you're legitimately PayPal Corp, in Malawi) and limited real estate price squeezes. Curation of "good" or "real" websites has been tried before - I don't envy anyone that wants to try another go at it.
- kreativ_py 1y agoyea the people at uz have no idea what theyre doing lmao
- zoky 1y agoI had a teacher in high school who once wrote a URL on the whiteboard like this: com/foo/bar.html Upon informing him that he had forgotten to write the domain, I learned that the site was actually www.com, and he had just left the http://www http://www part off because “the web browser adds that automatically”. I assured him that, while in principle he was more or less correct, but in this case it wouldn’t work. He ended up adding the www, but I could tell he was skeptical that I was just being a smart ass.
- zatkin 1y agoIt's funny seeing that list of MX apex records. In response to me trying to show off how I had acquired a single letter domain, and had a single letter e-mail address (which resulted in *@*.**, replacing asterisks with letters), my boss showed how he was able to receive an e-mail address under one of those two-letter 'MX apex records'...
- Animats 1y agoMost browsers treat one word not as a domain but as a search key. This was an issue when companies started getting their own TLDs. Could you just type "amazon" or "microsoft", which are TLDs, and go there without being diverted to a search engine? The answer is no. Even if you put a dot after the domain name. DNS lookup and web browser domain lookup are not quite the same. This is the price of a unified input bar.
- wibbily 1y agoMobile Safari likes to do this to me w/ machines on my tailnet. Whether dropping "foo:8080" in the address bar takes me to the webserver or to Google is random and I swear there is no pattern
- CraftThatBlock 1y agoAt a previous company, our intrasite was a bare custom domain, and the most reliable way to get there was to add a / at the end. This is likely browser dependent though
- eadmund 1y ago> This is the price of a unified input bar. I never saw what was wrong with having a URL and a search box in the same bar. It was fine, and I knew that whatever I typed into the URL bar would be treated as a URL. Fast forward a few years, and URLs I type into the bar are not treated as URLs (internal HTTP URLs get rewritten to HTTPS when a server is restarting).
- webprofusion 1y agoSlashdotted
- tony-allan 1y agoWebsite is currently rate limited. https://archive.is/MDRWw https://archive.is/MDRWw
- notepad0x90 1y agoDoes HN really have that many lurkers that it can can cause a hug-of-death on a website behind cloudflare like this??
- pxeboot 1y agoThe Cloudflare Workers free tier is not unlimited. They offer two options on how to handle the situation [1]. [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#daily-request https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/#d...
- throwaway519 1y agoWasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing? It seems only a privacy leak tool now. 1000 requests / min @ 10ms limit / request. That's 16 requests per second. Any reasonable CMS, wiki or blogging tool should be able to do one request in 62.5ms. Add on cacheing for non logged in users and nginx serving anything static, that's less than the power a $5 VPS provides. At these rates, the case for Cloudflare is a lot less than it was.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"Wasn't Cloudflare supposed to prevent DDOSing?" there a fine line between DDOS from bots and 30k real users accessing your site at the same time cloudflare do not provide resource for the latter
- singularity2001 1y agodon't they offer caching?
- 93po 1y agoisnt the point of a DDOS being unable to differentiate the traffic and therefore not block it? ideally it would look like organic 30k
- genewitch 1y ago
- geor9e 1y agoMy uncle had one of these in the 90s. All I knew was he was a higher up at the university in his smallish country, and ran their internet stuff. It confused the heck out of me when he verbally told me to bring his website up at Thanksgiving dinner, and after I typed a dot, he said "no no, no dot. just enter" And it worked. Baffled me as a kid. Nice to finally have some explaination for that fever dream of a memory.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adwawdawd 1y agohahaha siteless website due to "global cdn" not being paid lmfao
- lazaruzLong 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250511025024/https://lab.avl.la/dotless/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250511025024/https://lab.avl.l...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cduzz 1y agoEvery ten years I fiddle around with DNS and look for these weird names where the top level domain resolves to an actual address. It's funny to refer to these as "dotless" since you still need a dot, on the end, to "canonize" the name and tell your DNS recursor 'hey, stop appending domains to see if you can find this.' And, our recent history has "Canonized" a new pope, and you could (maybe?) look it up against one of the few dotless global DNS entries, but it's still going to need the trailing dot to tell your recursor that it's a canonical name...
- maximilianthe1 1y agoThis website has been temporarily rate limited You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.
- a3w 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250511025024/https://lab.avl.la/dotless/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250511025024/https://lab.avl.l...
- OhMeadhbh 1y agoi remember back in the old days a MX queary for a single letter between 'a' and 'm' would be sent to that root. if they wanted to, they could resolve the response. i remember having a conversation w/ paul vixie that he had either set it up (or was presenting it as a thought experiment) that he could have the email address "p@f". and i trust paul knew what he was doing with respect to DNS and RFC822 email.
- altprivacypls 1y agoIs it just me to whom it showed cloudflare rate limit. And then I clicked on the HN to see an archive link and then it worked perfectly. Jeez, If I am going to build any blog, I am just going to publish to archive.
- avipars 1y agoHug of death
- Tsiklon 1y agoI used to work with a very gifted old school systems engineer who used to run the network and systems behind a country TLD; I remember him telling me about how he sent an email from the TLD itself out to the world - something that baffled and shocked me as a junior at the time, simply thinking it wasn’t possible.
- tomcam 1y agoThere was once a domain named funkware, no extension. I learned about it in 1996 or 1997 from a fellow Microsoftie. It was maintained by a kid at Network Solutions who literally hid a server in one of their closets solely for that purpose. To my knowledge it was always a blank page.