Why do all email addresses have .invalid appended to them on our upgrade and test site?

Environment:

All Implementations

Resolution:

When an upgrade or test site is created, all email addresses are appended with .invalid. This causes all email addresses within your upgrade or test site to become invalid so that no reports, closed service request messages, or answer notifications are sent to actual customers from the test environment. This can also impact form submission from the Ask a Question page. This is a compromise between having real data in the test site and ensuring that the test site does not impact live production sites.

All email addresses in the system, both staff accounts and contacts, are modified. This only occurs once, when the upgrade site is created. When your production site is cutover to the new version of Oracle B2C Service, the values from your production site are carried forward into the upgraded site.

To test email functionality on the upgrade or test site, remove the .invalid extension from any email address that you want to use for test purposes.

Notes:

Mailboxes are disabled by default on the upgrade site. Refer to Answer 2145: Testing emailed responses from the upgrade site for additional information.