.invalid Information & .invalid Links at HealthHaven.com

invalid
Introduced	1999
TLD type	Reserved top-level domain
Status	Reserved to prevent conflict and confusion
Registry	IANA
Sponsor	None
Intended use	When necessary to show an address guaranteed to be invalid
Actual use	Popular to put at the end of intentionally-bad e-mail addresses used in newsgroup postings to avoid spam,
Registration restrictions	No registrations are possible
Structure	n/a
Documents	RFC 2606
Dispute policies	None
Website	None

invalid is a name reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in RFC 2606 (June 1999) that is not intended to be installed as a top-level domain in the global Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet.^[1]

Other reserved names are test, localhost, and example.

The reasons for reservation of these top-level domain names is to reduce the likelihood of conflict and confusion.^[1] This allows the use of these names for either documentation purposes or in local testing scenarios.

This top-level domain is sometimes used as a pseudo domain name in Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to convey either an error condition or in use of privacy protection. A notable instance of this usage is in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) where the domain anonymous.invalid in a SIP URI indicates hiding of a callers identity.^[2]

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b RFC 2606 (BCP 32), Reserved Top Level DNS Names, D. Eastlake, A. Panitz, The Internet Society (June 1999)
^ RFC 3325, Private Extensions to the Session Intitiation Protocol, C. Jennings, J. Peterson, M. Watson, The Internet Society (November 2002)

[rfc-0] RFC 2606 (BCP 32), Reserved Top Level DNS Names, D. Eastlake, A. Panitz, The Internet Society (June 1999)

[1] RFC 3325, Private Extensions to the Session Intitiation Protocol, C. Jennings, J. Peterson, M. Watson, The Internet Society (November 2002)

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