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Show HN: Personalized email addresses for your entire family

namekin.com

34 pointsjesperht56 comments

I happen to own mylastname.org and it has kind of been a problem if I’m being honest. I finally had to start start carrying around cards with my email address printed on them. People can’t handle it, they expect personal names to come before the @ and if you say anything after the @ besides gmail or hotmail or a business name they absolutely shut down.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that my last name seems like it’s misspelled...

This is precisely why I still give people my gmail, I realized if I wanna use a totally custom email I have to carry around a business card. I just might start carrying business cards soon either way, it's a subtle way for me to get myself out there when trying to network and meet new people.

I got the little half-size business cards from moo.com and just put my name and email on them.

Been ditching my business cards for http://clinck.me/ (no affiliation) over these last few years with great success, maybe worth a shot?

I keep a gmail account that forwards and deletes any received email to my hosted email. I use it for these types of businesses/people.

Similar with my business email. Had to end up buying a way shorter version because people just can’t spell.

I have a mylastname.name domain I use for email, and that confuses people and systems even more. Pretty much the only reason I also have a gmail account is for things that don't accept first@last.name as a valid email address. It does cut down on spam, though; I went literally years without any unwanted email.

A lot of people really don't have a clue about email. It is really not uncommon for a telemarketer to respond with "You work here too?", when I give them a theircompanyname@mydomain.nl address.

I owned mylastname.co for a year before I let it drop. Everyone expected either .com or .co.uk.

I tell people my personal email address at least once a week and I’ve never had anyone ‘shut down’. Sometimes after I finish saying it they ask, ’Is that it?’ That’s all though. I’m rik@hemsley.cc and when I registered it I was half expecting trouble but it hasn’t materialised.

Just to note I was also expecting the occasional web form to decide my address wasn’t valid, but it hasn’t happened.

I’m not sure why it’s been plain sailing but perhaps I’ve just been lucky to pick a TLD that happens to work okay for both these scenarios.

To confuse people further, I customize the email per website. So when I tell the person at home depot my order is under homedepot@johndoe.com,they often ask if I work for home depot then look confused when I say no.

Came up with the idea for this with my wife and decided to build it! Been dogfooding it with my family and am now sharing it with the rest of the world.

Tech stack is Node/Express running on Dokku/Digital Ocean for the API. UI is built using Parcel and hosted on Netlify.

Would love to hear your thoughts and happy to answer any questions you folks may have :-)

I run a similar for my family and deliverability has been the on-going issue. Every year or so I have to make some kind of update because some mail admin or other changes their setup and they start flagging our outbound mail (from foo@sokoloff.com) as junk/spam.

It's a good idea and I wish you the best of luck, but I am curious how you handle the outbound deliverability.

Thanks for the feedback! This is certainly a concern and one that I've tried to avoid by focusing on receiving (forwarded) email and not sending for the following reasons:

* Easier setup - nothing to configure and you can keep using your existing email setup. Using email clients can be very difficult for some people, especially older folks, so I don't want to make their lives harder by forcing them to learn something new.

* Less maintenance/upkeep - not having to worry about storing/sending/retrying means that users have a better UX.

I'd love to easily integrate sending from the custom email, and I may add it in the future for the power users, but I think the cost/benefit of it right now just isn't worth it so I'll keep things Simple©.

Assuming you are making use of Netlify's Identity service, and also their free tier value added dynamic integration leveraging Lambda?

Netlify is purely hosting static content and proxying requests to the API on DO which is doing all the dynamic stuff.

I think even just offering @namekin.com as an option, and allowing people to start mailing lists for their families would be awesome as well (of course, offering this for the domain option works too). Since some last names are way too common, it could even make sense to figure out a good list of most common domains to buy ahead of time and offer to use them to families. Of course you gotta make sure they understand other families with the same last name could be using those domains.

You could offer a single @namekin email as a sample of the whole service as well, which might go a long way and get you more feedback.

Holy cow I can't believe I didn't think of this, that's a great idea. I was struggling with finding a good way to hook people in with a freemium option, and this could be it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas.

No problem, I love this idea, it would be nice to see more than just gmail and other providers out there. I also love your web layout it's really nice.

You might think about adding chat into the mix. You could look at possibly rebasing onto Crossbox ( https://crossbox.io ),which also incorporates chat + some other stuff (I have no affiliation, just stumbled across it recently and the demo is pretty attractive). Or you could probably easily add an XMPP chat server/service onto whatever you've already built..

Should have noted your comments about your custom app/techstack, so forgive my comment about "rebasing" onto something else. However I still think incorporating a chat feature would add value and believe there would certainly be interest for it.

That's a really interesting idea, thank you for sharing.

Also, agreed - their site & demo are really great!

It looks quite cheap for someone with a larger family. But there's nothing substantial on the privacy page. I'd expect at least some more verbiage on how data will be handled and won't be handled. It also doesn't state how much disk space quota is allocated, how many mails can be sent, whether each user can choose multiple aliases, and any other limits that come close to what's considered abuse.

Tangentially, it's also amusing to see "family name" so ingrained in so many cultures that it's assumed that people who are part of a family will have a common name. Around the world, this implicit assumption breaks so many things for the people who culturally don't follow these (including visa applications, website forms, etc.). See point #20 here. [1]

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Thanks for taking a look. At the moment it's only handing receiving email, not sending - disk quota/etc are unnecessary. Cheers that link about names, really good point and quite interesting!

It's a great idea that a lot if families need. It's not clear what it costs and its not clear if we use our name domain or your domain and what happens if it's not available. The white glove service is spot on, the person who would pay for this would not be the person who would know how to do it themselves. And finally, this is a great anti Facebook family product and I think you should mention that somewhere. Hth

Thanks for taking a peek and your comments really highlight a need for me to make the pricing and explanation of the service much more clear. We generate several domain name suggestions based on your family name, you pick the one you like, and then we take care of registering and managing the domain for you. I also like the anti-facebook angle, great point.

Why do you think families need this?

Cost bit should hopefully be a bit more clear now, put on the main landing page along with the December sale section :)

Looks great, but one concern is lock-in or name hijacking. How do you guarantee that if I buy my domain name with you, it will actually be mine and not yours? This is important if I wish to migrate to a different provider one day without asking all my contacts to change my email address.

Great question. We mention it in our ToS that we are happy to transfer the domain whenever you want in case you want to take your business elsewhere.

I suggest making pricing a bit more obvious.

You arent collecting actionable (ie current email or similar to follow up) information prior to showing the price either, so I am not sure what you gain by hiding it.

That's a great point - wasn't intentionally "hiding" it, but you're absolutely right that by not collecting any e-mails I'll be missing out on plenty of opportunities. Will see if I can work it in without making it creepy + adding some pricing details to the main page. Appreciate you taking the time to look and giving feedback.

I think the suggestion was the other way around :D

Hah, I guess I'm trying to do both! Either way: Pricing is now on the main landing page together with the sale messaging :-) Thanks for the feedback folks!

I put in my family name, which contains a letter with a diacritic mark. It showed every domain as "unavailable". I suggest normalizing to ASCII.

Whoops, that's certainly an oversight. Thanks for pointing it out, will make sure that gets fixed :-)

You're welcome. I like the concept.

You might also want to check which TLDs support international domain names (IDNs) and which don't. The Czech TLD .cz, for example, doesn't[1], even though Czech is heavy on letters with them.

[1] https://www.xn--hkyrky-ptac70bc.cz/

Ah, TIL - had no idea :-) BTW, I deployed a fix which will hopefully fix the diacritic bug you mentioned in case you'd like to give it another go!

Seems like a nicely designed, friendly project to arrive for the holiday season. Nice job.

Thank you for the kind words, happy you enjoyed it!

Great idea! But the vast majority of people will find that their family name is taken.

Yup, definitely a challenge and the reason why I try to suggest lots of different TLDs as well as some simple mutations like name + "family". I'm still trying to figure out how else I can open it up for more useful domain names that don't become completely convoluted.

"the"+familyname+"s" might be another one to try, yeah my last name is also the name of a big company, and the Spanish word for Bull, so my options are limited in getting a "family name type of domain" only 1 of the options cropped up

A mutation that can be tried is removing the vowels from the last name. You might find it available, and also (at least for my fairly short, one syllable surname) almost makes the domain look and sound almost better and more smooth/flowy.

When I got married, I seriously considered taking my wifes name, for no other reason than the .co.uk was available.

This is cool but, even with a relatively uncommon last name, every single possible domain shows up as taken.

Bummer, sorry to hear it. Shoot me an email at jesper@namekin.com with your family name and I'll see if I can manually generate some suggestions for you that work :-)

The domain I actually own for this purpose, <last name>.fyi, doesn't appear to be on the list of suggestions. You should add that TLD. :)

Great tip - just deployed :-)

This kind of attentiveness is how you get me to refer Namekin to my friends — cheers!

I have an uncommon last name, and some domain broker contacted me that the domain squatter wants to sell it for $25,000+ (USD). It's honestly not worth even $1,000, and there's like only 20 people in the world who would want it. I openly laughed out loud for a while.

I used to own the domain <my initials>.io, and made the mistake of letting it expire. It was immediately picked up by a squatter and now they want thousands of dollars.

Not worth it.

I wanted to try and re-register an old, obscure video game fan site with a short but unpronounceable domain, and a human (!) broker called me and said that it was going to be thousands of dollars. I estimate it's real value to be less than what they're paying him to sell it.

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