Discard Domain Emails

During an implementation, you set up users and test business flows that trigger automatic emails. During this stage of setup, you probably don't want emails being sent to real users, so you can simply use discard email domains that Oracle has made available.

Discard Email Domains

Oracle recommends that you don't use fictitious email addresses, because this causes email bounces. Fictitious emails generally take three forms:

• An incorrect user identifier at a valid domain

• A random domain

• A domain that doesn't exist

Using fictitious email addresses can have numerous negative consequences, including unintentionally sending email to a real person or damaging the reputation of the IP address that sends out the email, potentially flagging it as a sender of spam. For example, you might send an email to [e-mail], thinking that ssf is just a random alphabetic sequence and not an actual domain. However, your email is actually sent to the Spruce Street Foods (ssf.com). The Spruce Street Foods email server must then determine if there is a valid recipient and, if not, make a reputation decision about the sender's IP address.

To avoid these undesirable conditions, Oracle has established email domains in each of its data centers that you can use temporarily during setup. Any email sent from Oracle cloud applications to one of the discard domains doesn't leave the data center. Instead, it's discarded by the mail servers during the send process. You can turn any recipient address into a discard address by replacing the domain information with one of the discard domains. So, in the example presented here, we might use [e-mail].

Here are the discard domains and the data centers that they're associated with:

Discard Domain	Data Center
@discard.mail.us1.cloud.oracle.com	Austin
@discard.mail.us2.cloud.oracle.com	Chicago
@discard.mail.us6.cloud.oracle.com	Ashburn
@discard.mail.ca2.cloud.oracle.com	Markham
@discard.mail.ca3.cloud.oracle.com	Calgary
@discard.mail.ap1.cloud.oracle.com	Sydney
@discard.mail.ap2.cloud.oracle.com	Singapore
@discard.mail.em1.cloud.oracle.com	Linlithgow
@discard.mail.em2.cloud.oracle.com	Amsterdam
@discard.mail.em3.cloud.oracle.com	Slough
@discard.mail.em4.cloud.oracle.com	Frankfurt
@discard.mail.em5.cloud.oracle.com	Munich

Discard domains cross data center boundaries. You can use any of them, no matter which data center supplies your service. Oracle provides data center-specific domains in case you're concerned about geopolitical boundaries and want to ensure that discard data remains in your data center region.

Discard domains are also available for government and defense data centers. For details on these restricted data centers, log a service request for cloud operations through My Oracle Support.

If you're importing your users, you can use the discard domains in your import file and then go back later and re-import the users with the real domain information. For more information on importing users, see the Overview of Sales User Import topic in the Implementing Sales guide. guide.