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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

I still have trouble using .co instead of .com even. No dot would definitely throw a bunch of sites off.

There is also a human problem to consider, my spouse owns surname.com (their address is firstname@lastname.com , we run our own authoritative DNS and manage the MX records for lastname.com) , a bunch of people out there assume that they are such a foolish, technically ignorant person that they don't know how to properly format an email address. To the extent that signing up for some things in person just results in time-wasting questions and "what, really", so they just give a gmail address to some people.

I remember receiving a phone-call from a tiny online shop - they seemed to think I'd mistyped my email address, because it was "their-company@example.com".

They found it unbelievable that my email address could match their domain, and assumed I'd made a mistake.

I do this too and it's most fun when giving my email address to physical stores. One time I was in a random optician's shop and had to ask what the store was called, "Such and such" - "alright then, that would be such and such at example.com".

I use a catchall as well, but if I think my email address is going to be read by humans somewhere, I try not to throw people off by using something like firstname.companyabbreviation@example.com.

Absolutely. I am always worried someone will think .co was me being silly and replace it with .com when giving it to people in person. I normally add "no M" to make sure they realise it's intentional.

Because of this problem I'd be really hesitant to use .co for anything I care about unless I was Colombian or doing business primarily in Colombia.

The situation is even worse with more obscure TLDs like .FYI.

I honestly cannot register to a good 80% of the sites I want to.

I have a .red domain and haven't hit any issues so far.

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