American Web Sites

[jon]

Quite a number of american web sites don't like my .uk email address and nag me to change it, but I like the status quo, it acts as a good fiter.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

In what sense don't they like it? I've never had any trouble creating accounts, more of an issue is the zip code if you need to put in a partial address as many do not understand post codes. Brian

[jon]

Some US organisations don't seem to recognise the email address, no trouble here....just wondered what the problem might be.

[charles]

I've had that too. Simply - not an accepted email address

[Roger Hayter]

Maybe the experts can tell us if it was an actual rule change that led to domain names of the general form of name.uk as opposed to name.co.uk becoming available? It sounds as though they gilded the lily a bit on email credibility checking and are excluding forms that are now permitted. Or were they always wrong about what was allowed? I seem to remember name.tv being permitted for a long time. If they had rules about every .xx top level domain individually they would need to be revising them rather often.

[Steve Walker]

I am certainly no expert, but I think that originally there were, .com(mercial), .org(anisation), .edu(cation), .mil(itary) and a few lesser known ones, .int(ernational), etc. Then as the internet grew, there was a requirement for more (especially where company names were duplicated), so .co.xx, .gov, etc. were added. .net for networking related domains.

Later as many more small companies and individuals wanted their own domains, more categories were added to give more options, so others were added - I use a .me.uk domain for personal use and did have a parallel .co.uk one for company use for a few years.

[Mike Humphrey]

Each country code has rules set by the country it's assigned to. So the rules for .tv are set by Tuvalu. Which does mean that there are at least

200 or so sets of rules (there are some ccTLDs like .eu and .scot that aren't assigned to countries by the usual definition). Some countries just have the end domains straight under the country code, some have another level in between. And the second levels have rules too - the rule for .co.uk is pretty much "pay for it", while .ac.uk has very strict rules about about what kind of organisation qualifies.

The UK now has a mixed system. Originally there had to be a second level

- .co.uk, .org.uk, ac.uk and .gov.uk being the main ones - though some second levels were assigned to a single organisation such as bl.uk (British Library) and parliament.uk. The second level domains have changed a few times - .me.uk was added not so long back as there wasn't really anywhere for personal domains (most people were using .org.uk or .co.uk). Recently the rules were changed to allow registering domains directly under .uk - though the second level ones haven't gone anywhere.

There's really no way to validate if a domain name is valid (other than by looking it up to see if it exists), beyond that it contains at least two elements and that the last one has at least two letters. Recently there's been a whole pile of top level domains created - some of which it's far from clear what they're supposed to be for. So while you can reject something like "abc@qwerty" or " snipped-for-privacy@example.z", there's no way to tell if " [e-mail]" is valid or not - even if ".nonsense" doesn't exist or has a rule that there must be a second level, that could change tomorrow.

Mike

[Tim Lamb]

For reasons best known to Namesco, I have .uk.com The benefit seems to be they can charge more!

[charles]

There is also the domain .scot for Scottish connected sites.

[Brian Howie]

I can't register my new Dell computer as I don't have a state or a zip code.

I found if put in C/O the Dell USA address it seems happy with the e-mail address.

Brian

[Roger Hayter]

That of course is because a commercial organisation managed to register uk.com with the .com authorities and now rents out subdomains. So .uk.com is not actually a uk domain at all, but looks like one.

[jon]

The original comment was pertaining to my email address which ends in .uk not being liked by some yank organisations. I wondered of it was too secure for them.

[Roger Hayter]

As I said above, it is almost certainly because their email validation is too complex and makes assumptions which are incorrect about possible email formats.