Why no numbers allowed in email address?

[Wp3]

I just switched to Visible last night after 16 years with Verizon. 
My primary email address was REJECTED by Visible because it has a number in the domain name. A number to the right of the “@“ in the email address. This required me to get another email address just to get started with Visible.

Do you realize how many domain names have numbers in them?

[DeanKevin64]

This would be something you would have to ask Visible. This is a peer to peer forum and not sure if I have seen an answer to this on here or on Visible's Reddit page. I think the issue extends to any special characters also besides numbers. I have no clue how many domains have numbers in them but the percentage for number versus no numbers has to be very low since there are maybe 3 to 4 posts of this between here and Reddit in a year. 

I don't think it is all that inconvenient to make a new email address, free at that, to save some money. I am with Visible to save money and even though I already have 3 email accounts I would start another if I had to save the kind of money I am. 

[Wp3]

Thank you for your reply. I did bring this up to Visible.

ChatGPT estimates that 30% to 40% of the .com domains contain numbers!

Not allowing perfectly valid domain names is silly and increases the friction for potential customers. It is an arbitrary thing to do. Most businesses want to make it easy for people to buy their product!

Following are the rules for globally accepted domain names:

Allowed characters: DNS names can contain only alphabetic characters (A-Z), numeric characters (0-9), the minus sign (-), and the period (.). Period characters are allowed only when they're used to delimit the components of domain style names.

[VisiblyPresent]

They have similar issues with the local part. In particular, many gmail users want to use the + sign feature of google to establish unique aliases for their multiple accounts (pooe old dad just wants to append the wife's and kids' firsts names to his email to keep track of the accounts. At last check, the + sign was flagged as invalid by Visible forcing use of the more cryptic placement of dots/periods. GMail ignores dot/periods and everything after a + sign in the local part is ignores.

My solution was to establish an Outlook account and define meaningful aliases - all aliases as well as the primary Outlook email address are then automatically forwarded to my primary gmail account.

Progrmming changes occur at a snails pace with Visible when all it takes in this case is someone fluent in regular expressions (or someone who can copy and paste the right one from any number of web sources).

Local part

The local part can be up to 64 characters in length and consist of any combination of alphabetic characters, digits, or any of the following special characters:

! # $ % & ‘ * + – / = ? ^ _ ` . { | } ~

NOTE: The period character (“.”) is valid for the local part subject to the following restrictions:

• it is not the first or last character
• two or more consecutive periods

[DeanKevin64]

What was their answer?

Of those 30% to 40%, which is likely global, what is the percentage that has tried to sign up for Visible? 1%, maybe 2% tops hence why I rarely see this mentioned.

It may also be allowed characters for worldwide domains but not a law saying websites like Visible have to follow that.

At one time users that had two accounts were using the same Gmail address but adding a period to their name, example, firstnamelastname... and firstname.lastname.... and would get the email sent to the same Gmail account. But it has been mentioned on Visible's Reddit page that no longer works, but I can't say if that is true or not.

[Wp3 · Accepted solution]

UPDATE

I worked with Alfred in Visible tech support today. He got the right people involved and fixed this issue for me. I am now registered with my primary email address that contains a number in the domain. 

This demonstrates to me that Visible LISTENS TO ITS CUSTOMERS. I think that's a big deal. I guarantee AT&T or T-Mobile wouldn't do something like that.

Big Kudos to Visible!!!