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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The "there is something wrong with you if you are at all off the beaten path" has cropped up a lot more for me recently; two examples both from 2026:

1. You can't use Firefox with our website (when I got this popup, I thought I had been transported back in time 20 years, but with Chrome substituted for IE).

2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"

2a. I ran some tests; it's the domain itself, not the host, so e.g. foo@gmail.com is allowed but not a foo@somewhereelse.com, even if hosted by google).

2b. After a bit of back-and-forth with support: "No, we won't tell you the list of allowed domains, but gmail and hotmail both will work."

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Vote with your wallet. I've only experienced two instances where systems wouldn't accept my custom email domain. One was a bank. I proceeded to close the account.

Unfortunately the most recent one was required for a kid's after school activity :/

> 2. You can't sign up for accounts with an e-mail from a "custom domain"

I remember debugging apple account creation because of that for a few hours. It wouldn't even tell me that my email domain/host was the issue, simply fail at the last step.

The same thing exists for phone numbers. About 90% of my calls with US banks go like this:

"Ok, first, to verify you, what's your phone number?" (oh no, it's one of those, because why do they need to ask...) "<my phone number>" "Ok, you'll receive a te— oh. Oh no. This is not a real phone number. What's your REAL phone number?"

Is that because it's VOIP or a landline?

VoIP, in my case. Probably much more secure than the average big three carrier plan from a SIM swapping perspective, but try convincing banks or their “security” service providers.

Reddit used to allow that till last week and now they started rejecting those emails. RIP temporary mail services and throwaway accounts.

Reddit didn't even require an email address up until a couple years ago. Throwaway accounts are getting more and more arduous to create.

Incredible... if I ever get that I'll enjoy pointing out I've had my domain longer than gmail has existed.

They don't care about how much older, more secure, more trustworthy and so on your domain is. That's not the issue they're having. The issue is that you are 'abnormal', and it is in the common interest of tech companies to make any signs of abnormality (read: not-total compliance to their whims) to be inherently suspicious and nefarious behavior that needs to be curtailed.

Which sites were these?

Most recently band.us

I started a typical registration process: enter e-mail, click on confirmation link, but the confirmation link showed a generic error the first time and then a "link expired" afterwards. I tried again a few hours later and then contacted support when the same thing happened. The response after a few days:

> BAND currently permits sign‑ups and linking only with certain email domains. If you want to create a BAND account using an email address, please use a more public domain such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

Strangest one still was the answer my mom got from Macy's. She is very persistent and was eventually told that Macy's does not support domains that have been registered with GoDaddy (note that the e-mail is not hosted by GoDaddy, just the domain is registered with them).

How bizarre. Like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

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