That site just made me realise that my surname (kitchen) has now become a .gtld
Someone else clearly figured this out before me though and firstname.surname has gone already.
What would I have done with it though? I've already discovered through having a .cc domain that there are many companies, websites and forms that simply don't accept unexpected domains.
For example, in the past I've spent several days on the phone with a business insurance company trying to get the policy emailed to the company email address and failing because somewhere in their system emails only get routed to 'valid' addresses where 'valid' includes known domain names. The only solution was buying a .com as well to use in such circumstances.
This is a big point. The internet probably has a million systems that have a regexp somewhere listing all the top level domain names that were valid at the time, and half of them aren't maintained and will stay broken forever.
That being said, email validation needs to check for trivial issues (i.e., have you entered a non-empty string? does it have a @ somewhere?) and the proper validation happens if a verification email gets delivered or not.
Someone else clearly figured this out before me though and firstname.surname has gone already.
What would I have done with it though? I've already discovered through having a .cc domain that there are many companies, websites and forms that simply don't accept unexpected domains.
For example, in the past I've spent several days on the phone with a business insurance company trying to get the policy emailed to the company email address and failing because somewhere in their system emails only get routed to 'valid' addresses where 'valid' includes known domain names. The only solution was buying a .com as well to use in such circumstances.