Moving away from .xyz

05.10.2026 2 min

Four years ago I purchased my first domain, fzorb.xyz from Namecheap for about two dollars. At the time I didn't consider things such as email deliverability when deciding on a TLD. As such, I just chose whatever was cheapest.

That was on June 28th 2022. It kind of became a vital part of my identity, now not so much. A lot has changed in these four years and I think it is time for a change of scenery.

Why switch?

Email deliverability. Sort of.

Generation.XYZ, the TLD's registry offers .xyz domains for as little as $2 for the first year. This is great for regular people like you and me, but it is also great for people running phishing or mail-spamming operations, where they are used as cheap throwaway domains.

Most if not all email providers do not even bother analysing the mail sent by a .xyz email address before throwing it into the spam folder. This is built into solutions such as SpamAssasin, which just about every email provider uses.

The breaking point came around May of this year when a simple follow-up email I sent regarding an order was greeted with this!

Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.0.0 mail.[redacted].[redacted]. said: This message
 was classified as SPAM and may not be delivered

Having my email in the spam box was one thing, having it be flat out rejected is terrible.

I really hate that it had to come to this but unfortunately it is clear to me that there are no ways to improve deliverability on fzorb.xyz. As such, I switched to the .eu TLD.

I actually wanted to get a .ro domain initially but due to requirements enforced by rotld I couldn't.

fzorb.xyz is dead. Long live fzorb.eu!