Over the last year the number of generic top-level domains (gTLD) has been greatly expanded. gTLDs are what you see at the end of a domain such as .com, .net, .org etc. This was clearly felt to be too limiting and so a whole raft of new gTLDs were proposed and adopted. These include .london, .furniture and even .blackfriday. You can find a fuller list here.
To me these were interesting but not ultimately useful until I started on a new side project and needed a new catchy domain. After going through countless .com domain variations and finding that all the best ones were taken but available for sale. I took a look at the new gTLDs and found the .tools domain which would work perfectly for what I wanted. So I went and registered ever.tools which looks a bit odd but really is valid.
All was fine and dandy until I tried to register for third party services with my new email address admin (at) ever (dot) tools and quickly found that I wasn’t as welcome as I expected to be. Both Amazon and Twilio rejected the email address although the error messages in both cases were misleading. In the case of Amazon their issue seems to be that they are expecting the gTLD to be no more than four characters.
I was interested to see if this was a generic problem so I put together the following to see how PHP handled the new gTLDs and all I tried passed without problems.
<?php
$email = "admin @ ever.tools";
if (filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
echo "This ($email) email address is considered valid.";
}else{
echo "This ($email) email address is considered invalid.";
}
?>
I have reported the issue to both companies and Amazon have acknowledge that it is an issue. Now I just need to wait for a fix to be rolled out.