I’ve experienced this with Merlin BirdID by CornellLabs. My suspicion is that they are using some sort of API to verify email existence but only against aboveentioned “big providers”. Of course that wouldn’t support any of my selfhosted email domains. On the other hand they didn’t verify my ownership of said email, therefore I’ve registered with birds@gmail.com, that I don’t control and I sincirelly apologize to whoever does… For my use the account has no value whatsoever anyway. Also, I’ve checked and my login information are gone from the app now, so maybe the’ve fixed it already?
Anyway, I’d love to know what “valid and recognized” means. The only thing that you need for mail delivery is a valid MX record and a mailserver sitting on the end of that record. As an admin by trade, I suspect this is not malicious by design, it is just a lousy/lazy developer who trusts the statistically probable answers of his AI agent more than he should. ( Oh - it’s an AI app - that makes it almost certain 😇.)
I’ve experienced this with Merlin BirdID by CornellLabs. My suspicion is that they are using some sort of API to verify email existence but only against aboveentioned “big providers”. Of course that wouldn’t support any of my selfhosted email domains. On the other hand they didn’t verify my ownership of said email, therefore I’ve registered with
birds@gmail.com, that I don’t control and I sincirelly apologize to whoever does… For my use the account has no value whatsoever anyway. Also, I’ve checked and my login information are gone from the app now, so maybe the’ve fixed it already?Anyway, I’d love to know what “valid and recognized” means. The only thing that you need for mail delivery is a valid MX record and a mailserver sitting on the end of that record. As an admin by trade, I suspect this is not malicious by design, it is just a lousy/lazy developer who trusts the statistically probable answers of his AI agent more than he should. ( Oh - it’s an AI app - that makes it almost certain 😇.)