Contact Forms That Turn Away the New Domain Endings

An address the form will not take

Type an email address ending in .plumbing into the contact form on many small business websites, press send, and the form refuses it in red: please enter a valid email address.

The address is valid. The form simply has never heard of the ending, and it says so in a way that blames the visitor.

The endings that went on sale yesterday

The first of the new domain endings, among them .guru, .plumbing, .bike and .clothing, went on general sale yesterday, after a week of early access at higher prices.

Hundreds more are due to follow through the year. Anyone can now register one and use it for email, including your customers, suppliers and job applicants.

Forms written when the list of endings was short, and seemed settled, were never told.

How a form decides an address is valid

Most forms check an address before sending it, to catch typing mistakes. The check is usually a pattern: some characters, an @ sign, a domain, a dot and an ending.

The trouble is in the ending. Older patterns either list the endings they accept, or allow only two to four letters after the last dot.

A list rejects every new ending. A length limit lets .guru and .bike through but turns away .plumbing and .clothing, which makes the problem harder to spot.

Other places that check addresses this way

The contact form is the obvious one, but the same old pattern is often copied wherever the site or the office handles addresses:

• Order and checkout forms, where a refused address ends a sale.
• Account sign-ups and password reset pages.
• Newsletter boxes on the site.
• Booking and application forms, often built separately.
• The office's own systems, such as the customer database.
• Imports that skip addresses they do not recognise.

Each may date from a different year and a different hand, so fixing one tells you nothing about the others.

What the visitor sees, and what you never see

The visitor sees an error that blames them. Some try another address, some phone, and some decide the business is behind the times and leave.

The office sees nothing. A refused form is never sent, so there is no message to notice and no record anywhere unless someone set one up.

That is why the problem can run for months. The only sign is an absence, and nobody counts the enquiries that did not arrive.

Testing your forms

Testing takes a few minutes per form. Use two made-up addresses: one with a short new ending such as .guru, and one with a long one such as .plumbing.

A refusal appears on the page at once. If a form accepts the address, any confirmation it sends to the made-up address simply bounces.

Try every form on the site, including any on a separate mobile version, and write down which form refused which address.

Do the same in the office. Add a test contact with each address to the customer database and the mailing list, and see whether both are kept.

A worked example

A Christmas market runs for five weeks each winter in a downtown plaza, with about eighty vendors, and takes vendor applications through its website from the new year until spring.

Many of its vendors are makers: knitters, potters, photographers and small clothing labels, the very people several new endings are aimed at.

This week the organiser tested each form with two made-up addresses. The vendor application refused both, the volunteer form took .guru but refused .plumbing, and the newsletter box took both.

The vendor form held a fixed list of endings in the page, and the same list again in the code on the server. The volunteer form allowed four letters at most.

The developer who looks after the site replaced both with a check that confirms the shape of an address without judging its ending, in the browser and on the server alike.

The error message changed from a flat refusal to a line asking the visitor to look for a missing @ sign or a stray space, and the test addresses went into the maintenance notes.

The new check no longer depends on a list that will keep growing for years. It catches typing mistakes, which was always its job, and nothing else.

Why the fix belongs with whoever looks after the site

The pattern often lives in two places, the page and the server, and fixing only the first leaves the second to refuse the address anyway.

It may also sit inside a theme or plugin that the next update overwrites, which puts the old check back without anyone noticing.

A careless change can do the opposite damage. Removing the check invites junk submissions, and a broken one can stop every message. Changing, testing and recording it is maintenance work.

Error messages that help

Whatever check a form uses, its error message should help. Say what looks wrong, keep what the visitor typed, and offer a phone number for anyone still stuck.

A visitor told only that their address is invalid has no way to know the fault is yours, and nothing to try next.

The counter-case

Very few people have an address on a new ending yet, and most will keep their .com and .ca addresses for years. A form that refuses .plumbing today turns away almost no one.

But the failure is silent, the endings are multiplying, and older patterns were already refusing established endings such as .museum and .travel. The test takes minutes, and the fix belongs in routine maintenance anyway.

A form check for the new endings

1. List every form on the site.
2. Test each one with a short new ending.
3. Repeat with a long ending such as .plumbing.
4. Note which forms refuse which address.
5. Have both checks fixed, in the page and on the server.
6. Rewrite the error message so it helps.
7. Add the test to the routine after every update.

Step five matters most, because the check usually lives in two places. A fix in the page alone passes a quick glance, then fails when the server repeats the old check.

Inventory hidden behind the site search form deals with a different way a form can shut out part of a site's audience, in that case Google itself.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.