This post is partially channeling my wife’s outrage, but as the household tech support department, I’m equally annoyed.Here’s the story.
The .group top-level domain (TLD) launched in 2015. I know this because I looked it up after dealing with this nonsense. My wife has a personal domain name using .group. It’s short, simple, and sounded nice and professional when we registered it.
We both use a mail service that supports unlimited aliases. Every new website or service gets its own unique email address. That way, when one of them leaks or gets sold, we know exactly who’s responsible for the spam. It’s a great system.
Today, for example, I got an obviously dodgy email pretending to be from a legitimate service provider. It was already flagged as spam, but even if it hadn’t been, I could tell it wasn’t real because it was sent to an alias I’d only ever used for a different service. Case closed.
So yes, that whole “unique email per service” setup works brilliantly. And my wife has adopted it too, with some encouragement from me and a bit of technical assistance.
Now here’s where the outrage begins.
It’s 2025. The .group domain has been around for ten years. There are hundreds of new top-level domains now. And yet, there are still websites out there that refuse to accept an email address ending in .group.
She’ll try to register for something, type in her perfectly valid address, and the site throws back: “Please enter a valid email address.” Excuse me? It is a valid email address. The site’s validation code just isn’t built to handle it.
This drives me absolutely mad. I’ve built and supported web applications for years in e-commerce, corporate systems, and startup products. It’s baffling that companies still don’t invest in maintaining their websites properly. Maybe they don’t know how modern validation should work, or maybe they just haven’t prioritized it. Either way, it’s not a great look in 2025.
Our fix was simple, if slightly irritating: we bought another domain. It’s not quite as clean or memorable as the .group one, but my wife liked it, and it works. It’s a standard .uk domain, which every site on the planet seems to accept without complaint.
Problem solved, more or less. The new domain costs about five pounds a year, which is fine. The annoying part is that the .group domain, the one she can’t use everywhere, is about three times that price. But it’s tied into too many existing services to just drop.
That’s the real downside of using custom domains for email. Once you build your digital life around one, moving away from it is basically impossible.
So now, our workaround is simple. We’re keeping the .group domain active for existing logins and old services but using the new .uk address for anything new.
It’s not the fault of the .group registry. It’s just a side effect of how unevenly the web is maintained. Some companies build things properly, others never update. And here we are, ten years later, still running into “invalid email address” errors for perfectly valid ones.