.engineering Domains Considered Harmful

I recently started consulting to help me bootstrap my company Monkey Test It and decided that a “.engineering” domain name would be a great fit because:

• Although I do product and HR work as well, I’m focused primarily on engineering and development related services.
• My preferred .com was taken, so .engineering would give me a domain that’s minimal as well as looking clean and professional.
• .engineering is novel and has a certain amount of buzz around it (also a bit of a conversation piece).

One thing that I took for granted was that I would be able to sign up and use all my must-have apps…I was wrong. LinkedIn, a critical service for business, does not recognize “.engineering” as a valid email address. This did not seem to be an issue on any other service. I could neither associate the .engineering address with my existing account, nor create a new one. This did not work on the website nor in the app. I decided that this must just be a silly bug, so I reported it to LinkedIn, and after some back and forth and issue escalation, I finally got the dreaded e-mail:

aka: tough luck.

It seems that they aren’t going to fix this anytime soon. I wonder if they have an arcane regex for e-mail validation deep within their system that they don’t want to touch? To add insult to injury, completely invalid email addresses like “[email protected]” is accepted and can be used. 🤦‍

I encourage all fellow “.engineering” users to contact LinkedIn — maybe if we make enough noise, then they’ll listen and prioritize the issue. Until then, I would advise against using this TLD.

Update

Since posting this I’ve had a few people point out that it’s LinkedIn that should be avoided, and not the .engineering TLD. While I completely agree that it would be the right choice in an ideal world; however, when in the consulting/biz heavy world, then LinkedIn is critical and cannot be easily avoided without risking lost business.

Update #2

I’ve been contacted by someone from LinkedIn engineering who says that they are considering this a serious bug and will be raising it with the relevant engineering group & are hoping to have a fix soon! 🎉