I always use `myco.example` for testing requests and emails, as well as documentation. 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.

Never 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’.

No guarantee an .example TLD won't be created

The first line of the linked Wikipedia page states that it will never be created.

Ahem. Thank you.

Literally the standard, my dude. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2606#section-2

Standards can change, but I guess if you allow for that, example.com is no better.

Doh! Thank you for the correction. I thought I had read that RFC

Well I am hilariously wrong. Thanks, renewiltord.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29629387

I 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.

20 packets a day? Phew! So you barely survived the DDoS!

Well, you also have to run the Kubernetes cluster, ELK stack, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger to monitor the application and scale elastically between 0 and 20 packets.

Maybe they’re running their DNS server on a solar-powered Arduino.

At least you’re not a sysadmin for Contoso, those folks must have their hands full.

I 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.

Exactly 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.

Yep, even if you use a "random" email address like [email protected], they may very well have a "catch all" email account that will receive that mail.