Obligatory "I wrote something similar" post. But my tool is written in Java, doesn't run in the browser, but does use @example.com for the email addresses.
Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js
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Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js
#22This is cool. I'm gently disturbed that it generates valid email addresses. You pick a random name, follow it with an @, then add a random word, and then add a TLD. Obviously you're not responsible for how people use the tool. Best practice would be to use the domain example.com
In most use cases I can think of the generated data is used only in a closed (testing) environment and won't be visible to web crawlers and spambots. Many developers like me use these libraries for prototyping different UI views for their apps. Unfortunately, spammers do have way more advanced technologies to try and guess working addresses. Libraries like this generate mostly very improbable addresses: you would get…
In most use cases I can think of the generated data is used only in a closed (testing) environment and won't be visible to web crawlers and spambots. Many developers like me use these libraries for prototyping different UI views for their apps.
The bigger problem, in my experience, is when you accidentally spam people yourself, while testing some function that somehow generates an outgoing email. I think almost everybody that's ever worked on code that sends emails has - at one time or another - ran a job that somehow wound up sending 6,712,374 "test" messages to every user in the production database. :-) Dummy addresses are better, but it's better still if they use @example.com so you know there's no way they'll actually get delivered to anybody.
Re: Faker.js - generate massive amounts of fake data in the browser and Node.js
#23This is cool. I'm gently disturbed that it generates valid email addresses. You pick a random name, follow it with an @, then add a random word, and then add a TLD. Obviously you're not responsible for how people use the tool. Best practice would be to use the domain example.com
If someone really wants to guess random addresses it isn't hard for them to write it themselves.