What's "normal", though? "<8-10latinalphanumerics>@gmail.com?"

My email is just "me@<my-last-name>.al"[1] which is just a tiny bit "unusual" - and over the years it got refused by a couple stores because of TLD. And Albania is not Cocos Islands, they're surely not popular with spammers.

If a store believes there's only ".com" gTLD and nothing else (this had really happened to me, some galaxy-brain made a form with a hardcoded ".com" suffix; not even ".net" or ".org" were accepted, unfortunately I don't remember the site) - well, fuck that store, their loss not mine. Worst case, if I really want something they sell, I'll give them a throwaway email - which will contribute to their mail bounces after some time.

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[1] ".al" is a ccTLD for Albania which is not a country of my citizenship or residence. I've picked the domain name as hack - because my first name is Aleksei and my first and middle names form "A.L." initials as well. That, and because all relevant .name domains were already taken.

Might sound strange but yes, me@<my-last-name>.al is being clever. You found a nice short clean email by buying a domain from Albania and setting up a me@ address. That's clever.

Think about it this way: either you can get some big brand .com email with no special username and never have an issue, or you can flail around 5% of the time and yell at the clouds.

Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you.

> Should everyone accept your email? Of course! I'm just saying you live in real life, and in real life people suck at building email forms. The problems you run into are on you.

No, the problems they run into are caused by (at best) mediocre developers. They’re entirely to blame. We have specs and standards for a reason.

I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say. What's actionable about your view? You going to call up every business that doesn't accept your email and tell them their programmers suck? Businesses like this are never going away. It's a losing battle.

Instead you can just get a big name .com email and call it a day. Live your life without trying to make some statement about email standards.

> You going to call up every business that doesn't accept your email and tell them their programmers suck?

No, because it's not 1993, but I absolutely do use the contact forms or bug reporter for any website that doesn't accept my email. Most of them fix it, because it's objectively a bug caused by their non-compliant code.

I completely agree with the pragmatic response, and not only encourage it, but do this myself too. It is absolutely the correct advice in the situation.

However. I completely disagree with the conclusion “The problems you run into are on you.”

I didn’t create the problem by having the audacity to be from a different country.

We should totally shame developers/businesses who don't accept valid emails, just as we should continue shaming those with insane password policies or insecure practices.

This conversation reminds me of the 0.00001% of people that browse the internet with JS disabled and then complain about how so many sites don't work for them.

If you aren’t accepting very normal email addresses at perfectly valid TLDs, then you are a bad programmer. At least import a list of the new TLDs every ten years.

Of course they're a bad programmer. But we live in real life, where bad programmers exist.

Get a big brand .com email and you'll never run into an issue.