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The Foo at bar.com (bar.com)
134 points by ANaimi on Aug 24, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments



Remember there are special domain names you can use to enter fake email addresses like example.com[1]

I also entered addresses I thought were fake. But there are so many registered domain names you can't make sure they are really fake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com


Reminds me of the guy who owns DoNotReply.com:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...


And yes, that is the same Chet Faliszek of Valve/Old Man Murray 'fame'.



When I was a comp sci student in the 90s, I was testing some code where I used foo@bar.com as a placeholder. Amusingly, I got a reply from The Foo, and now I'm glad to know I wasn't the only one who accidentally emailed him/her.

As others have pointed out, username@example.com is a better choice for documentation and examples.



I hope you are a millionaire already, because you are sitting on some with that domain name. Kudos to you for keeping it this long.


Love stumbling across domain/site combos like this. Like the digital equivalent of holdouts/nail houses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_%28real_estate%29). There's a surprising amount of them still out there.


Since I own bar.io and foo@bar.io is a valid email address, I also receive some interesting emails from time to time.


Also see asdf@asdf.com: http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html I've gone to asdf.com for about 15 years now, and it hasn't changed it all. It's also always up, so it's handy to go to to test and see if I have Internet. I love that site.


It also loads quickly and runs almost no Javascript, making it great for anything you want to test in the dev console.


I use http://to/ for testing purposes. It has the shortest url and the the webpage consists of only 4 short lines of html.


I too am guilty of this and I would like to apologize if any of my old mistakes have ever caused you any additional work.

I have since seen the light and switched over to example.com which doesn't have an MX and doesn't listen on port 25, so no harm can be done to it.


I typically use `foo@example.com` [1] and `07700 900000` for mobile [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com

[2] http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/numbering/guidance...



lots of folks

I wonder if these were the general population of users seen today, since AFAIK foo/bar are not in the vocabulary of most people as metasyntactic variables; I hear "blah" more commonly used for this purpose.


It's not in the vocabulary of users (who don't know what "metasyntactic" means anyway), but it's still prominent in the vocabulary of developers.


Sitting on gold with that domain name.

https://www.metricsbot.com/www/bar.com


I can't help but think the pricing methodology on this site might be a bit off. I put uw.com in to check it because I know some of the history of that site. It said the site is worth less than $9.00!?

uw.com was originally owned by a company called Underware. Their biggest product was a defect tracking tool called TrackRecord. They were bought by Compuware in the 90s, and in early 2000 or 2001, Compuware forgot to renew the domain and it was bought out from under them. Last I checked, two letter .com domains were pretty rare and valuable.


> Last I checked, two letter .com domains were pretty rare and valuable.

That was last time you checked. Now they're extremely rare and astoundingly valuable.


Last time I checked, you were no longer allowed to register 2-letter domains at .com, .org, or .net.


Anything @test.com would have gotten sample stuff from at least one dev as well, so sorry about that!


Well, I guess I should apologize to the folks at bob.com. It's example.com for me from now on.


I love the MX 127.0.0.1 trick. I'm curious if that works as well as I think it does.


I feel kind shamefully guilty now. I'm sorry.


I think their database-foo is somewhat lacking...



dummy@guy.me


That's another legal address. You knew that, didn't you?




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