I’ve recently been working on de-Googling and part of that has been setting up an email with my custom domain. This mostly works great, but one issue I’ve noticed is email validation on some websites detect this email address as invalid. For instance, if I have the domain [name].rocks with the email [name]@[name].rocks (with [name] being a placeholder for my name) my email cannot be used to register with the Ventra app (for getting mobile train tickets) I believe because any site that has an extension with more than four characters is detected as invalid.

I understand this is a validation issue on the end of the app dev / website, but I was wondering if people had suggestions for workarounds when they encounter this? Setting up other custom emails with forwarding? Thanks!

  • mox
    7•1 month ago

    The correct fix is to get the site maintainers to stop rejecting email addresses based on the characters they contain. They shouldn’t be doing that. Sadly, some developers believe it’s an appropriate way to deter bots, and it can be difficult to educate them.

    If they won’t fix it, the workarounds are to either not use those sites, or to give them a different address. Unfortunately, the latter means having to maintain multiple email accounts, or forwarding services like Addy.io, SimpleLogin, Firefox Relay, or DuckDuckGo Email.

    • 2xsaiko
      1•1 month ago

      Unfortunately, the latter means having to maintain multiple email accounts, or forwarding services like Addy.io, SimpleLogin, Firefox Relay, or DuckDuckGo Email.

      It doesn’t, you can hook multiple domains up to deliver mail to the same mail server. I have three domains pointing to a single server myself.

      (edit: added full quote)

      • mox
        1•1 month ago

        The rest of the sentence you truncated points out forwarding services. Yes, others exist beyond the four I mentioned, of course.

        Edit to clarify: Your “it doesn’t” argument is that you can use forwarding from other domains that you own. Indeed you can, but that’s not a counterargument, because those are forwarding services. They do exactly what I described: the same thing as the example forwarding services in my original comment. You still have to maintain the them, as well as maintain the extra domains.

        • 2xsaiko
          1•1 month ago

          Okay, I edited it to quote the full sentence. You also don’t need those either, though.