
foo@bar.com is a real email address - acangiano
http://bar.com/
======
vog
I thought this is basic knowledge of everyone technically engaged in Internet
stuff. But apparently, this isn't the case, despite its well-known and very
readable documentation! [1] It says:

1) There are exactly 3 domains the IANA keeps free for that purpose:

    
    
        example.com
        example.net
        example.org
    

2) In addition, all domains under the following 3 top level domains can be
used freely for that purpose:

    
    
        *.test
        *.example
        *.invalid
    

3) The domains under the following top level domain have some special meaning
(should point to loopback IPs only):

    
    
        *.localhost
    

Everything else is either registered, or might be registered by somebody in
the future. Don't (mis)use those names unless you own them!

Unfortunately, this kind of criticism is not always welcome on HN. (for
example, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129459> was scored -1)

[1] RFC 2606, <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606>

~~~
stock_toaster
*.local is a great example of why not to use a domain that just 'sounds good' as an internal dns suffix, as it is used by bonjour/avahi[1]

I had to rename an entire corporate network once because the previous folks
thought .local "looked good". It cause constant issues with clients that had
bonjour or avahi running.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local>

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Wait, why doesnt apple just fix its software? .local isn't reserved. Seems
like picking some arbitrary fix over another isn't helping matters.

~~~
lambda
Well, .local would be reserved if the mDNS draft,
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cheshire-dnsext-
multicastdn...](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cheshire-dnsext-
multicastdns-14) , ever progressed to an actual RFC. It is already a de-facto
standard, with several implementations.

------
elliottcarlson

        This page is a memorial to Foo at Bar.com
    
        Back in the earliest of early days, I (The Foo at bar.com) got a few emails a week, mostly from sysadmin type people who were invoking The Foo in an effort to debug some kind of system or other.
    
        Of course I, being a gregarious sort, answered the messages.  Mostly along the lines of "hello?  Foo here.  What can I do for you?Ó or "who you?  I Foo.Ó
    
        I met a lot of really interesting people in 1994 and 1995 that way.
    
        But soon I had to return to obscurity, as my email volume grew overwhelming.
    
        Y'see people building web sites started putting little "give us your email address and we'll let you see the goodies" challenges in their web sites, and lots of folks entered foo@bar.com.
    
        Soon, I was getting thousands, then tens of thousands of emails a day, mostly from people who didn't care whether I replied or not.   Alas, I was overwhelmed and had to return to my solitary life.
    
        For a while, I MX'd email addressed to me to 127.0.0.1 but that made some people cranky (although I still take some quiet pleasure at the thought of what that address did to spammers).
    
        I MX'd the mail over to a friend's spam-detection server for about 4 hours one time, but the volume crashed his server and he asked for relief.
    
        So now I'm content to tell you this small story.
    
        Onward,
    
        The Foo

------
old-gregg
That is so true... Most developers who get an account with Mailgun
(<http://mailgun.net>) get so excited about the live email log or for some
other reason... they _love_ to fire up emails to @test.com. We have thousands
of emails in our queue destined for test.com at any given moment.

Guys, please stop: what makes you think test.com can't be a real destination?
:-) Actually, they don't have a mail server for that domain, but still...

~~~
pyre
Some should setup a MX on test.com and:

* post a public webpage with all email going to @test.com

* post a public webpage with all email addresses harvested from emails to @test.com

Or

* setup an auto responder asking people to stop sending there (bonus points: threaten to post emails of repeat offenders to spammer lists)

~~~
robin_reala
See also donotreply.com:

[http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told...](http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html)

------
WalterGR
First we spammed them, and now we appear to be DDoSing them.

~~~
dendory
See it boggles my mind how a site cannot survive a front page HN appearance.
TideArt has been on the front page a number of times, sometimes even second
top link, and I happen to know this brings around 10,000 more hits. Using my
own custom CMS, built on SQLite, I handle that kind of traffic _easily_ on a
shared host.

HN will never bring you more than a few hits per second at the most..

------
christoph
Reminds me of: <http://test.com/contact/contact_spam.htm>

I dread to think how many emails they get everyday.

As a side note, looks like they copied HN's favicon.

~~~
mmastrac
The favicon issue is actually a Chrome bug. Sites that don't provide a favicon
will sometimes end up with the favicon of the referrer.

~~~
christoph
It's not identical, just looks like the same orange with a single white letter
in the middle, only noticed when clicking between the two just how similar
they were.

Wasn't aware of the Chrome bug though, thanks.

------
bhuga
A related topic that drives me nuts after years of operations is the fairly
widespread use of '.int' to represent private DNS on an internal network.
'.int' is a rarely used TLD for international organizations created by treaty.
It is so rare that many browsers do not recognize it as such and will ship you
off to a search for 'www.nato.int', for example. Nonetheless, it drives me
batty whenever I see 'dns1.int'.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Worse yet, some internal networks use .local, despite its standard use for
mDNS.

------
illumin8
I truly feel sorry for the poor guy that owns asdf@asdf.com. I must have
registered for over a hundred different accounts on various Interweb forums
using his email address...

~~~
sirclueless
He mentions that his real email is jklsemicolon@asdf.com. Which is just as
funny, and not as prone to cheap viagra offers, presumably.

------
mirkules
If you really need to receive a test email, you can always use @mailinator.com
(just make sure it's not sensitive info). Mailinator is a disposable, publicly
viewable email address mostly useful for one-time account registrations,
especially in cases where you fear they might spam you.

In recent years, I started using the + notation at gmail -- anything you put
after the + and before the @ is ignored by gmail, BUT you still receive it --
the handy part is you can filter it out (e.g. myname+hackernews@gmail.com will
go to myname@gmail.com, and I create a filter to archive everything that comes
to myname+hackernews@gmail.com)

~~~
a_m0d
The "+" trick is great, except for sites that use hair-brained email
"validation" scripts which reject the address. Sadly enough, these are often
the ones that I most want to use the "+" for (its a great way to also keep
track of who hands out your email address to spammers).

~~~
Kevindish
I have the solution for you there:

If your email is mylittlepony@gmail.com

Then your can use as many '.' and filter it out.

You will also receive emails sendt too my.little.pony@gmail.com

M.y.l.i.t.t.l.e.p.o.n.y@gmail.com

Gmail ignores punktum. Thats smart!

~~~
mirkules
Huh. I didn't know about the punctuation marks. That IS smart. Thanks!

------
dsears
I used to work for a company that hosted customer.com. Microsoft, on more than
one occasion, sent thousands and thousands of emails to customer@customer.com.

~~~
aaronmorey
One developer probably entered customer@customer.com in a database, and then
another guy probably accidentally triggered the "email everybody in the
database" script. I can see how that would happen. I've obviously never
personally done anything like that but _I know a guy_ who tripped the "Send
sales report to CFO" using test data once when I was an intern.

------
dredmorbius
<http://bar.com.nyud.net:8080/> should bring up the coral cache, if/when
anyone can actually get through to the origin URI.

------
smokinn
Interesting that this guy could write a quick script that could take out
almost any mail server on the web for more or less free.

I imagine only a few of the big guys (yahoo, microsoft, google) could handle
large unexpected volumes without hiccup.

------
bingaling
As is jklsemicolon@asdf.com: <http://www.asdf.com/asdfemail.html>

------
mrspandex
I'd think you'd have to expect this when you set up that email account.

(Also, it wasn't enough to spam them, now we DDoS them)

~~~
ImprovedSilence
yeah, but it looks like he set it up waaaaaaaaaaaay back (like before the
eternal September) solely in order to get a rise out of emailing people back.
Then the internet blew up and broke his email.

------
dkl
I have a domain which is much the same, though I don't get nearly the volume
bar.com does. And, I now feel guilty for having used foo@bar.com a few times
in the past. Mea culpa!

~~~
rmoriz
same here at asdas.net

------
user24
I can only imagine the volume this guy gets - I have user24@gmail.com and I
get about an email a week signing me up for something or other. It's very
annoying.

So if anyone's reading this: Please stop using random gmail accounts and use
foo@bar.com instead. Thanks!

* just kidding, test@example.com would be the one to go for ;)

------
mtrimpe
My usual address for this kind of thing is john@doe.com. I've always wondered
who would get those emails...

------
squeed
Some folks registered asdf.com, and had a similar experience. I wish they
posted their inbox for all to see.

(<http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html>)

------
TeHCrAzY
Work proxy killed the page, with "Block Access\Standard Users\Blocked
URLs\Block - Harmful & Stealth".

The thing is an overly sensitive, badly configured setup; but still
troublesome?

------
brandonhall
Haha, that's why I always use a dummy email addy at our own domain and make
sure all unrouted mail bounces.

------
cjoh
How much do you think Bar.com is worth? Seems like a domain that'd sell for a
pretty penny.

------
logn
since the site is dos'd:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/>

------
veyron
bar.com seems inaccessible. Can someone who saw the site in the past few hours
confirm that <http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/> is up
to date?

~~~
rm-rf
The whois for the domain is accurate.

~~~
veyron
Yes but I still can't access the site ...

------
mcauser
I frequently use aa@aa.aa - last time I checked, there were no countries using
.aa

~~~
seanp2k2
To you and everyone using things != .+@example.com: why? Example.(com|net|org)
were specifically created for this purpose and for the purpose of tutorials. I
work in client-facing support, and it's very easy to troubleshoot software
that /other people/ write when the client says something along the lines of
"It says 'connection to example.com:25 failed'" -- I instantly know what the
problem is. If you're using things other than example.(com|net|org) for this,
you're possibly making the job of a support tech you'll never meet harder.

If your excuse is "I didn't know about example.com!"...well, that's a lame
non-excuse. Do the rest of the IT world a favor and fix your tutorials and
software -- mail server administrators like me already have enough headaches
from the gazillions of spam techniques in use today.

~~~
danssig
>well, that's a lame non-excuse.

Ignorance _is_ a legitimate excuse. I'm getting sick of people spreading this
moronic misunderstanding that ignorance is not an excuse. Just recently the
_police_ in NYC failed to follow a judge's order out of ignorance. I wonder
what excuse they used.

As for why people don't use example.com, if you're signing up for a site that
annoyingly makes you put in a password it will check for non-real email
addresses so example.com is out.

------
RobLach
Not related but bar.com being a wordpress blog is surprising.

------
jackgavigan
So is sp@rtacus.com

------
nirvana
For future reference, the example.com domain is maintained for the purpose of
documentation, etc.

Thus foo@example.com might be a better address to use, especially in examples.

~~~
lanstein
.com, .net, and .org are all reserved for this purpose.

~~~
shaggyfrog
Just to add a source, it's all in RFC 2606 section 3:
<http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt>

------
pitdesi
We get a lot of crap email address signups at <http://feefighters.com> We do a
little bit of filtering to check that the email address is legit, but let you
get by anyway (with an additional click) if it isn't... we have a 1-click
unsubscribe but this is making me rethink whether we should let fake email
addresses through at all.

We recently got this email from Fake.com

 _Hello

We own the domain fake.com, and from time to time some moron out there in the
world-wide-waste-of-time uses our name to try and sign up for something...

Not just that, there’s also a whole slew of dozy IT people who test links by
doing the same thing without doing a whois check first!

Whichever it is, could you please delete this account?

Thanks [redacted]

fake landscapes \- the artificial plant company <http://www.fake.com*>

Somehow I don't think this has the desired effect... that's a tough domain
name for this sort of thing, feel sorry for the guy but not much we can do.

~~~
bretthoerner
The only reason they'd notice & care is because they received email they
didn't want, right?

I assume you have an obvious 1-click subscribe on _all_ of your emails? If
not, I'd gladly mark you as spam over, and over, and over...

------
funkah
I've never been a fan of foo and bar as example names. Particularly in code
examples, I can never keep them straight because the names are meaningless.

Anyway, we already have example.com for this purpose.

~~~
kmort
To be fair, their meaningless is their value. Using "real world" names may
distract from the logic being discussed or unreasonably suggest that the logic
may fit only a particular scenario.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable>

------
earl
I now feel really really bad for fuck@off.com. I owe someone an apology...

~~~
icebraining
You're fine, off.com doesn't have MX records.

~~~
holdenk
Except some people fall back to the A record (see RFC 5321).

~~~
seanp2k2
Can you please let me know where you're seeing this? I looked through
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321> for /\sa\s/i and /(fall(\s)?back)/i and
didn't find anything related to this this behaviour. I ask because I'd like to
have my answer at [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8221381/where-does-
email-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8221381/where-does-email-sent-
to-example-com-go/8221408#8221408) be as accurate as possible (plus I'm now
curious about this).

Thanks!

~~~
there
it's not a fallback, it's the default behavior. originally when you would send
mail to a user at a host, the MTA would just connect to that host on port 25.
the original SMTP RFC (821) pre-dates any DNS RFCs, so originally there wasn't
even a concept of MX records and you just e-mailed someone at the server they
had an account on.

after DNS was in place, MX records came along in order to route mail destined
for a host to a different server, or just supply a list of backup servers. now
since most people just use email addresses containing only a domain, MX
records are pretty much common place (since the A record of many domains
resolves to the web server). now MTAs check for MX records before trying to
connect directly to the host.

to demonstrate:

    
    
         jcs@thalamus:~> host -t mx test.jcs.org
         test.jcs.org has no MX record
         jcs@thalamus:~> host test.jcs.org
         test.jcs.org has address 10.10.10.10
         jcs@thalamus:~> echo test | mail test@test.jcs.org
    

and shortly after, in postfix's mail log:

    
    
         Nov 21 22:59:18 thalamus postfix/smtp[23742]: connect to test.jcs.org[10.10.10.10]:25: Operation timed out

------
taf2
That fuckers getting a lot of emails!

~~~
danssig
fucker's (fucker is)

