I've noticed that the domain
contoso.com
is often used in documentation when a sample is needed. I always figured this was a dummy domain, used like the telephone prefix "555" to route spam into some kind of telecommunicative void (although contoso.com appears to be a real site).
Is there a domain I can safely use when I have to, say, test a registration form 20 times with a unique email address and I don't care what happens to the message, yet I don't want it going to a real person?
You can use example.com. According to the Wikipedia article:
example.com, example.net, and example.org are second-level domain names reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force through RFC 2606, Section 3,[1] for use in documentation and examples. They are not available for registration.
By implementing the reservation, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) made available domains to use in manuals and sample software configurations. Thus, documentation writers can be sure to select a domain name without creating naming conflicts if end-users try to use the sample configurations or examples verbatim.
When an address such as "[email protected]" is used to demonstrate the sign-up process on a website, it indicates to the user they should fill in an actual e-mail address at which they receive mail. "example.com" is used in a generic and vendor-neutral manner.
These domain names resolve to a server managed by ICANN.
how about example.com?
It is a valid domain, but reserved by RFC to be used for documentation.
Contoso.com is a dummy domain that can be used for testing.
It's used by Microsoft as an example whenever they need an example company or domain. They're the ones who registered it, and they use it frequently in their examples, so I doubt they care if you use it for testing. They likely ignore anything that goes it seeing as how its posted all over the web and a likely target for spam.
Frankly, I utilize an email address from my own testing email server for this because part of the testing is to ensure that the form information actually gets to the email address, and since checking it is outside of my normal work-flow, that means I have to actively do so.
If it's email you want to test, why not use a disposable email address, such as GuerrilaMail? You can send an email to [email protected], or set your own user name, for a limited amount of time.
BTW, Contoso is a Microsoft dummy site they've been using to demo .Net technologies for a couple of years now.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2606.html has all the standard reserved names. Notably, example.com and the like started resolving a few years ago. Before that they were truly reserved names, not even found in DNS. But they are still useful "fake" domains.
I started using [email protected] for this purpose, but then I began getting responses back from my outgoing email server saying delivery to that address had been delayed. I don't know about the OP, but I want something that I can send to and completely forget about it.
Now I'm changing over to [email protected] -- I know that it gets delivered to their catchall (so I'm not getting any junk back about delivery errors), and if I like, I can even go check at http://mailinator.com/ to see if the email went through as planned. (But it's not clogging up my inbox if I don't care about it.)