Fake and legal email, URL, and phone number for your forms

Placeholders are important elements in terms of UX and accessibility in your forms, whether on the web or in a desktop/mobile application.

This allows the user to understand (in addition to the field name) what exact information should be given and in what form it should be written.

Be careful, for your form to be accessible, your field absolutely must be accompanied by a label, a placeholder alone is not enough!

But when it comes to certain fields like email or phone number, we don't always know what placeholder to put because we shouldn't give an email or a phone number that actually exists.

But fortunately, cinema is here to save us!

Because yes, when a domain name (or a phone number) appears clearly in a movie, many viewers will then rush to seize the opportunity to find out if the site really exists.

And at the same time, many cyber-squatters will try to reserve the domain in question in order to display an astronomical amount of advertising on it.

Example.com

The name http://example.com is a fictitious domain, reserved by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), dedicated to illustrative purposes, behind which lies a simple page explaining the concept and presenting the authority in question.

Similar domains with different TLDs are also available and lead to the same page:

• example**.org**
• example**.net**
• example**.edu**

You can therefore use this url for your forms, but you can also use any email from this domain name such as eric@example.com, help@example.com, ...

Be careful, there is no MX record behind this domain name, so don't use it to test email sending with your SMTP server, you will receive a rejection notification.

Reserved phone numbers

In the United States, ranges of phone numbers have long been reserved for fictional works, notably for cinema and television.

The exact official ranges go from prefix 555-0100 to 555-0199, but in reality many directors simply choose a number starting with 555- as can be seen in this list of numbers seen in cultural works.

In France, since 2018, a certain number of prefixes have also been reserved, one for each zone, even including the mobile zone:

• 01 99 00 xx xx
• 02 61 91 xx xx
• 03 53 01 xx xx
• 04 65 71 xx xx
• 05 36 49 xx xx
• 06 39 98 xx xx

You can use any number drawn from these prefixes as you wish, and if you want to make sure of the legality of the process, here is a link to the page of the relevant article of law on Legifrance:

Even more...

For more fictitious data, you can also use the API https://randomuser.me presented in our article "13 free and powerful data APIs for your applications"