Is yahoo.net a valid email extension?

October 3, 2009 2:18 PM

Is yahoo.net a valid email extension?

Hi, all. I feel slightly ignorant asking this question, but I can't seem to find an answer on the general intertubes. I am a public librarian, and I was just helping a gentleman send an email to his brother. He insisted that the address his brother gave him was [e-mail]. I told him that typically yahoo email addresses end in .com, but he was pretty adamant about the address. We sent the email to both places- [e-mail] and [e-mail], and the yahoo.com email bounced back, but the yahoo.net email didn't. Typing in www.yahoo.net takes you to the regular yahoo.com home page. Does anyone have any insight into this conundrum?

posted by agathafrye to technology (10 answers total)

Well, yahoo.net exists and accepts mail, but it has an entirely separate set of mailservers and IP addresses from yahoo.com. OTOH, they are registered to the same Yahoo as yahoo.com. Hm.
posted by hattifattener at 2:35 PM on October 3, 2009

In the old days, .net was intended for companies that were involved in maintaining internet infrastructure (eg Demon employees were on demon.net, while Demon customers were on demon.co.uk). Maybe his brother was simply a Yahoo! employee.
posted by Leon at 2:45 PM on October 3, 2009

More hm:

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/
http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/

It seems unlikely that it's a free email address, but it's definitely an active URL 99% likely to be under Yahoo's control.

Otherwise it is an elaborate and boring hoax.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:45 PM on October 3, 2009

Maybe his brother was simply a Yahoo! employee.

As far as I know, yahoo-inc.com is what they use for employee addresses.
posted by zerbinetta at 2:50 PM on October 3, 2009

They use yahoo.net for various development sites (see e.g. http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/), so maybe the gentleman's brother works for them?
posted by effbot at 2:51 PM on October 3, 2009

http://mail.yahoo.net/
posted by Leon at 3:02 PM on October 3, 2009

Seems like Some promotion they ran in 2006, and they still haven't updated the page. here's another article. Weird.
posted by delmoi at 3:37 PM on October 3, 2009

If you're asking about the domain www.yahoo.net, take a look at its whois record. Since it's a yahoo owned domain, it seems reasonable that they can use it for email.
posted by palionex at 5:52 PM on October 3, 2009

It seems to be an address that bellsouth.net customers were forced to change to.
posted by dhartung at 8:55 PM on October 3, 2009

Thanks for the feedback, folks! Mostly, this guy had no idea what he was doing, so I was shocked that the email went through at all. He was also trying to send a gmail email through google. As in, typing the email in the google search box. :/
posted by agathafrye at 10:48 PM on October 13, 2009