I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service | Hacker News Reader

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

tinyprojects.dev

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I'm genuinely impressed by the author's willingness to come up with such a silly idea, go through with it, implement a completely barebones website that won't even let you send emails from the addresses and starts selling subscriptions for $10/year.

I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely impressed. If it were me I'd spend 2 years mulling about it and never actually do it because I'd be worried about not managing to make it work correctly.

I'll take "things you can do when you're single"... can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"

I've come to believe that there's a certain amount of insanity required to be a great entrepreneur. Like Jobs or Musk--their personal qualities aside, they both had arguably legitimately insane visions that they refused to let people talk them out of.

The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).

Steve Job didn’t invent the smartphone and Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car, they did both make those things cool.

Steve Jobs also had a treatable form of pancreatic cancer and died from it, because he refused traditional medicine.

You can point to countless inventions and advances in humanity that are not due to crazy asshole geniuses. What happens to people is that the better you are at something, the more willing they are to forgive your flaws. This allows those flaws to grow and grow, to the point where you’re accusing random people that insult you of being pedophiles. But these flaws are not a requisite part of being driven and not giving up.

There are way more insane people in mental institutions than insane billionaires.

Hmmm, I wonder if the ratio of "insane billionaires : insane people in mental institutions" correlates to the ratio of "sane billionaires : sane people (presumably not in mental institutions)"?

Are you more or less likely too be a billionaire if you're insane?

(Is there even such a thing as a "sane billionaire"?)

It depends on how we define "sane", doesn't it?

If we just mean "not evidently delusional or psychotic", then probably a billionaire is no less likely to be sane than anyone - probably if anything more so, one power of money being that of reliable access to medical care.

If we instead by 'sane' mean "firmly grounded and operating within consensus reality", as I once heard the term defined, then I think the question becomes considerably more interesting. (Whose consensus?)

Classic correlation / causation bias

A common wallet with a SO freaks me out :)

You don't have to go all-in, but a common wallet is very useful as a wash account for common expenses.

Having an account just for expenses, with no overdraft, that's usually at $0.00 balance is useful for other purposes too (ACH pull is dangerous! Especially when everyone who has ever looked at your check can do it)

But why would you do that? I mean if that's you money, why would you ask your partner? I'm pretty frugal, don't spend on stupid things easily (well, things that I find stupid, at least), but if I had a business idea or even a fun project I don't think I'd need permission from my partner to spend my own money on it. Discussing it is a different story, of course.

I think it's pretty common that when people get married it becomes our money instead of my and your money.

And we can buy emoji domain names.

I don't know how common it is. I'd guess it's at least also pretty common that it doesn't. But the GP didn't even talk about a formal/legal marriage (if that makes a difference in your reasoning). They said significant other.

Maybe in a “partnership” you don’t need to ask a “partner”.

But in marriage you don’t have “your money” - you are both on the same team, so all money are shared. If you spend $1000 on something random, that sets your team, your family, back of its common goals - house down payment, vacation, etc.

Agreed. But as somebody mentioned above: It's good to maintain a (small) personal budget for each partner that they can spend as they please.

I am in a long marriage,we each have our own money and joint account money. We are both in the same team and can spend our own money. Each person has the same percentage of take-home to spend as an individual.

Work for us, may not work for others.

This is just you having "extra" money. I guess it's a demographic thing but do you (and everyone else) not understand that over 50% of people (in the US at least) don't have "extra" money. The money they make is already allocated before it's made, any sort of "extra" spending goes on a credit card or forces some other payment to be not made on time, often incurring fees. In some cases that money would deplete a small savings balance.

This is pre-covid numbers but 69% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings. 45% have no savings, and roughly 30% spend more than they make each month, accumulating and juggling credit card balances / short term loans.

I'm from a poor area in the US and most people have $0 "extra" money. As an example my high school 10 year reunion was a few years ago and the target goal was $20. Even with a year's notice most people said that would be too expensive and they wouldn't have it. ($40 per couple).

We had multiple fundraisers to try and get everyone to participate. The fundraisers were everyone buying extra chicken wings with their food stamp cards and giving it to a local restaurant that cooks them and sells fundraiser plates and a car wash sponsored by the bowling alley that gives a free game to anyone who gets a $5 car wash.

Wasn't all of this caused by people not knowing how to manage money rather than not being able to save?

How long can you continue to spend more each month than you make?

I don't fully trust that story. Maybe many of the people who have "no savings" have a mortgage to pay off? Technically they have a debt and all spare money goes to the bank, but really they own a house that is worth more than the debt?

In such cases I'd say it is more of a mindset issue.

I don't get the quotes. Not sure whether you're mocking or hinting at my use of the word partner as being incorrect in this context or you are downplaying the seriousness of (romantic) relationships outside of marriage. Well, if it's the first, indeed there is the name of such "partnerships" it's officially called a domestic partnership and legally not very different from marriage in most secular states in the western societies.

If it's the second one, it may come as a surprise, but you you don't have to go to the church, even in front of a state representative or throw a big party to start and maintain a normal, pair bond based relationship or even a family.

And I'm pretty sure that most people who end up marrying, start with such "partnerships" and only "upgrade" when they feel that it "works". Which also means that they'll set most of the rules before the act of marrying. It's only a guess, but it wouldn't make sense to make too big changes compared to what you have tried, what worked and what you've probably grown to like. I'd also guess that it's the same with money things. At least it should be, because it's said to be one of the few that can cause serious disagreements between partners.

Anyway, to put it short: different people require and like to maintain different level of independence (or the illusion of it, doesn't matter). Also, $1000 can be a large sum for one family and a smaller one for the other, so it's actually pretty hard to even gauge your opinion. E.g. I live in Eastern Europe, work as a software consultant and while $1000 is about the average monthly salary it's just a fraction of mine and my partner would never see it as a setback if I spent that amount on myself because I just felt like.

Of course, if we have common goals then you should not endanger those without discussing, but I wouldn't like to be in a situation where basically 100% of my earnings are accounted towards a common goal. That's just too much stress. Then you either making too little (which is very stressful) or have very stretched goals. And while it sounds almost the same, the difference is that in the second case you do have a choice to make. And it's better to choose a more relaxed set of goals and life. Maybe that 2 stories house in the suburbs or that 2nd car, etc. isn't worth it to have to beg your partner to blow $300 on a more expensive laptop. Or even just to have that thought in the back of your mind.

It's a matter of trust; my wife and I don't sweat the small stuff, but if we're spending more than £100 on something, we'll probably discuss it first - that doesn't mean she gets to say no to the top of the range MacBook Pro, just that she knows what's going on.

Which is basically the same what I've said and fundamentally different from what the GP hinted at.

I feel like he could've got it going with 5 or 10 emoji and spent a lot less. Also impressed with his commercial.

I thought about that but I think the main advantage of doing it this way is to corner the market somewhat. You get all the "good" ones and make it harder for anybody to clone your idea.

I keep expecting this to tie back to a Borat sequel.

I'll never understand this, but I see it all the time. People should have shared money, and they should also have their own money. Does my wife like it when I buy myself expensive toys? I have no idea, it's irrelevant unless I stop covering the bills.

When your family has limited resources and needs to prioritise it's frustrating when somebody chooses to use those resources on frivolity.

You can still have personal budgets, even if they are very small. Heck, when things are tight, even having 10 Euro personal "fun money" a month for each partner can give a bit of freedom.

Freedom

10EUR

GP mentioned a situation where money is tight.

I’m glad you’ve never been in a place where 10 Euro fun money felt like a bit of a luxury.

I don't know where you lived but I've been there and 10EUR doesn't make you feel free.

It's an amount lower than the volatility of basic life (running out of toilet paper...). You would have to save five months to buy a jeans.

10EUR remaining on your bank account is precisely the amount that makes you feel insecure and poor.

Either you live in a very poor country, either you have no idea what you're talking about and are just condescending.

"a bit of freedom" is the quote that you're arguing about.

You must be mis-understanding me. I am implying that the basic necessities are covered by the common budget.

10 Euro buys you a coffee in a nice cafe a couple times a month. When you're poor, that's something!

I've never been that poor, but I've had limited funds in the past, and I can say that having even a small amount of money that you're psychologically comfortable spending on anything is a massive relief. Sometimes the best thing you can do in a situation largely out of your control is to consciously take back any amount of control you can, even if it ends up being more symbolic than anything.

That goes a lot further in eastern europe than you might think!

For sure, but the original article and the comment I replied to are talking about relatively expensive spends.

1200$, which were not squandered but invested.

You should do something about your financial situation if that seems like a lot of money to you.

Edit: how is it controversial that if you are poor, you should try to do something about it? To claim it is impossible to escape poverty is madness (unless you are sick or handicapped). Obviously the only way to escape is if you do something about it.

Even if you just earn 5$ per hour, you can try to save something. 1000$ would be 200 hours, not impossible. A better strategy would be to try to find a job that pays better, though.

"Stop being poor"

That's how what you are saying sounds like.

EDIT: Even when you aren't poor, blowing 1K on a crazy project that might or might not pay off is something that a lot of couples would discuss first.

> To claim it is impossible to escape poverty is madness

This is an offensively wrong statement and suggests an extremely privileged and out-of-touch upbringing. There are numerous - hundreds - of articles explaining in-depth why it's very expensive to be poor in the US.

> Even if you just earn 5$ per hour, you can try to save something. 1000$ would be 200 hours, not impossible.

It really sounds like you're suggesting that someone in poverty should be willing to work for below minimum wage for 200 hours (5 weeks of full-time work) to save $1000 to "invest" on Kazakh emoji domain names? I would typically assume I'm misunderstanding someone since that's such an incredibly asinine comment, but given the first half of the comment I have to wonder if that's what you actually mean.

"This is an offensively wrong statement and suggests an extremely privileged and out-of-touch upbringing. There are numerous - hundreds - of articles explaining in-depth why it's very expensive to be poor in the US."

Nobody says it is not "expensive to be poor". But it is idiotic to claim it is impossible to escape poverty. Billions of people have done so in the last century.

"It really sounds like you're suggesting that someone in poverty should be willing to work for below minimum wage for 200 hours (5 weeks of full-time work) to save $1000 to "invest" on Kazakh emoji domain names? I would typically assume I'm misunderstanding someone since that's such an incredibly asinine comment, but given the first half of the comment I have to wonder if that's what you actually mean."

No, your interpretation is asinine. However, if you believe "emoji domains" or whatever have a shot at becoming a viable business, doing that is an option. Personally I would suggest trying to find a better paying job first. But if you can't, what would you suggest? Vote Democrat and hope for a minimum wage law, which will then make you lose your job?

Obviously, if you don't believe in the emoji business, don't invest in it. Find something else to invest in.

Bills. And retirement savings. And college savings for the kids. Oh yeah, saving for the new stove.

I give myself $50/mo to spend on whatever I want. Anything else I mention it to my wife. Oh, and if it takes space in the house I mention it too.

It's for family budgeting and trust. We generally ask/inform if we are going to spend more than $100 on any given project/item. This helps both of us realize if it's a need or want. That way if I mention I'm going to get a new video game, I'll be stopped if its the third one in a month. Or if she wants new luggage, is it because it is needed or is it desired because it's a new color that is available.

You might make enough money to not really need this kind of consent. That's great if you do. For us, it is just a small check to help us get to our goals.

Our solution was to sit down and decide what amount and cadence of "fun money" we can safely allocate to ourselves, and we can save or spend that individually.

In our case we have very different spending habits - I love to get a fairly regular coffee-shop latte & croissant, or fancy restaurant meals with friends, and similar things that savings gurus tell you will prevent you from ever retiring (my spouse's point of view).

My partner likes to spend way too much (imo) on "toys" once or twice a year.

We spent way too much time being obnoxiously judgemental at each other before we did the math and discovered each spending pattern works out almost exactly the same in aggregate over a year or two. Now we just set that aside and there's no judging because we know that the amount spent averages out to under what we decided was reasonable.

Yep, my wife and I each have separate checking accounts that are basically our own allowances, set up with an automatic recurring transfer every month. We're fortunate enough to have enough financial security to do this.

We do the same, but in reverse: we roughly figured out what we need for shared spending, and have both set up automatic transfers into our shared checking account from which those expenses are paid. Everything that remains can be spent at will without having to consult the other.

Edit: No kids though.

Yup, the same here down to the no kids. The tricky bit is deciding on what counts as 'shared spending' — my partner is insistent that it should cover necessary bills only, I think it should cater for almost everything we share including meals out, for example.

I'd love to hear more details on how you are defining 'shared spending'. I've seen my parents have major conflict over control of spending and this shared account idea is very appealing to me, when I need it.

So, as mentioned, right now it's just essentials: mortgage and house bills really. Everything else we pay for individually — our own mobile bills, etc. We tend to alternate on things like meals out.

What do you want it to mean? There's no right or wrong answer but there's basically four fairly common ways to do it across the spectrum: 1) two individual accounts only and you pay everything separately; 2) joint account is for truly joint bills only - think mortgage yes, car payment no; 3) joint account is for "family" expenses - mortgage, cars, groceries regardless of who will eat them, etc.; 4) one joint account only and 100% of spending comes out of there.

#4 seems very common for my parents' generation (in their 60s). #1 seems like a logistical headache for something like a mortgage.

My ex-wife and I basically followed #2. This works fine for a lot of people. It worked fine for us until it didn't - unrelated to the OP, but if your spouse runs up a shitload of CC debt while you're married, you're responsible for half of it. If she cashes in a 401(k) and uses the entire proceeds to pay off said debt, you're responsible for half the taxes.

My current SO and I have discussed merging accounts will probably do something closer to #3 - each of us putting in somewhere between 50-75% of our income into a joint account, and the rest is personal money. But the joint account is for everything. Obviously joint stuff yes but basically anything that isn't 100% individual will come out of that account.

Not being snarky: What's the alternative? Like, what would happen if you didn't do that?

I ask because my wife and I spend money however we like, and I think it'd be quite strange if she checked in with me before spending $150. Is there some useful context or previous over-spending that you're solving, or is it something you'd recommend for everyone?

Maybe 100 bucks mean to him far more than 150 bucks mean to you, or 15k to Elon Musk, or 15 to someone struggling to escape homelessness.

People generally treat their partners like pets or property where they gain agency over each other’s wallets and body.

I could careless what my partner spends his or her money on or even whom they decide to sleep with. We treat each other as equals to make their own decisions together or apart.

If you’re with an irresponsible person then you either break off the relationship or agree to suffer with the consequences of their actions.

It works surprisingly well. Others should try it.

> even whom they decide to sleep with

I do not expect this to be popular.

There are many forms of consensual non-monogamy, including polyamory and others. I don’t know exactly how common, but I’ve heard 5%.

I doubt I’m the only one a bit surprised by this post.

Do you live with your partner? How do you split shared or somewhat-shared expenses? Are your incomes equal? Who has the role of managing expenses? If you go out to dinner, who pays? What if you share a dessert? (.. etc - you get my point.)

I hope you’re willing to expand given your enthusiasm for your lifestyle, but more context will help.

I’m not the parent commenter, but, the same thing comes up with friends and housemates. Even married couples who are otherwise “traditional” sometimes keep their finances separate. You each pay rent. If you go on a trip together or buy something for the house, you split the costs. The shared expenses are the easy conversations. If anything, sharing all money obfuscates the harder ones.

Exactly this.

We have our own personal accounts and then one shared joint account for things we decide to buy together.

When we buy property, we buy it together or if one chooses to buy it alone that’s OK as well.

We also have a loose relationship document that we have created and regularly review to discuss things important to us.

- death - children - retirement - house chores - parenting - sex - commitments

Whatever style of relationship model you have overcommunication and active listening are extremely important especially as it deals with ones feelings, needs and fears.

ALWAYS handle tough conversations the same day (preferably) or week to avoid spiraling negativity and resentment.

No, there are no consequences for not telling, at most we would be a little disappointed. This doesn't happen that often. Maybe once a month or so, and it's always "Hey I'm gonna by X for Y." "OK". Then we are a little less shocked when we see a $130 charge show up on our statement.

We do have saving goals, like for a house, paying off bills, etc. We aren't wealthy people my any measure either, so every bit counts.

Life is just different for us that don't make as much money and are trying to get ahead.

Spending habits become exponentially more important the less money you make. If you make $125k as a software developer in a MCOL area you can basically spend whatever you want and if you're not downright reckless you're going to be fine.

If you're a couple whose combined income is $50k, spending is important and you simply can't afford to have your partner blow $80 on something because that could cause you to miss a bill, incur late/NSF fees, etc. My parents are elderly now and there's certainly a generational aspect as well but they made very little when I was growing up and they both knew every dollar that left the checking account. I make good money in tech and my SO is a physician so we just need to decide what portion of our income is allocated to joint expenses and the rest will work itself out. There's ways to optimize it of course but an NSF fee from the bank or a $30 late fee from Comcast is not really a concern for us the way they were both very real concerns for my parents.

My wife and I do the same thing. 99% of the time the answer from the other is "Yeah go for it, I don't care". But there has been occasions where one, usually my wife, says "we might want to wait on that" or something to that effect. It's worked for us for 20+ years.

I like that approach

This is also how my wife and I approach our money. We don't stop each other from having fun but we're aware of any big spending before it happens.

I disagree on initial premise of having shared money...

you must not have kids. If my wife and I have relatively large personal budgets to spend on ourselves, it would feel like we are denying our kids a nicer holiday or a nicer college education.

Unless of course you're rich enough to afford everything.

I have a one year old, and I grew up poor. We still don't have a lot. But at some point you don't have a money management issue, you have an income issue.

I guess this is a problem only in USA. In Europe, the education is inexpensive enough with government funding and some effort from the child(which eventually pays back). Holiday vacations are usually for the whole family or organized by the school so this is planned expense. And in my opinion most of the expensive "toys" are usually not good for the child, like giving a sever year old an iPad/iPhone. I prefer to go with toys that spark creativity which usually are less expensive. That is not to say I would not buy expensive toys, however I believe that they should be given as rewards for memorable achievements or and to teach them what investment is. However I do admit that during the first five years the expenses for a child are huge, because most things have very short utilization lifespan - strollers, clothes, furniture, toys etc.

Instead of shared money with personal allowances, which works in constricting manner, we have shared goals approach to which we contribute whenever and however we can, which works in contributing manner. And we try to keep our budget aligned with our forecast for the goal or we reevaluate the forecast in case of unforeseen circumstances like the COVID pandemic. Of course we don't hit all of our targets but with time we get better at evaluating. Also any unspent money from a missed goal start as base for another goal.

Way to miss the point. The examples I gave are just illustrations and not restricted to the USA. In simple terms: if you make a "selfish" purchase there is always an opportunity cost in terms of money not spent on loved ones. I don't see how parents can justify having a large personal budget unless their total budget is millionaire-level large. Have nicer and/or more frequent holidays instead, or get a larger house in a nicer neighborhood, hire a nanny perhaps.

Where by large you mean 1000$? Why would you have to be a millionaire to be able to afford that? What exactly do you plan to buy for your kids?

Expensive holidays are not automatically better, by the way. You don't need a luxury hotel abroad, maybe kids would actually have more fun going camping.

Also everybody seems to be missing the point that those 1200$ from the article where a business expense, not a "selfish purchase" as such.

"there is always an opportunity cost in terms of money not spent on loved ones" seems to me that by that logic you don't "love" yourself and you put very little value to yourself and that you only serve your loved ones. Everything that I purchase and that brings me happiness in term usually makes the people around me that love me also happy. Either by improving my mood and so improving my social interaction with them or simply because they care about me. And most of the things that I can and will buy for myself are transiently valuable to them as well. I buy an Omega watch -> someday I will leave that watch to my kid hopefully with a good story and a loving memory. I get a gaming PC/console -> I get to spend time with my kid playing a game. I build a utility room into my garage -> I get to teach my kid how to build/fix something. I buy a telescope -> I can spend time showing them the stars/galaxies etc. I do not buy something like that when there are more pressing matters at hand. However if we are meeting our common goals the money that we earned are for us to spend in whatever way we want, including giving presents for each other(even in the form of money). The freedom to care for ourselves improves our care for each other.

This is a topic we covered in pre-marital counseling. The exact approach you pick matters less than making sure you both agree on it. My wife and I share all of our money and agree on big expenses before they happen.

It's very specific to each couple. My wife and I both trust each other and consult each other on big purchases. We also trust each other not to be controlling and judgmental. We have no need for separation of money. Not everyone can do this and that's also fine.

I guess software dev can afford to blow 1000$/year on silly side projects. Especially seeing how he got back significant portion of his expenditure. Being single or not has nothing to do with that? It sure seems fair to agree on spending policy with your significant other beforehand, but other than that...

It's a time thing also "Sweetie, I don't want to go to your parents for dinner b/c I'm building <insert silly fun project here>"

On the one hand, I'm single and if I wanted to I could also blow a few grand on emoji domains for an experiment, then I could. On the other, I'd be taking a few grand from my savings for my mortgage deposit.

This isn't about relationship status, the author of this post just has money to burn.

And even if the author expected to get their money back through paid sales...they're on the hook for those accounts now unless he personally writes it off.

It was kinda like that in 2013 when I suggested btc mining to my wife to cover the costs of the electric heat in our new house. And here we still are...

Hope you learned your lesson, buddy.

There's several lessons in there and I learned them all really well.

I once registered 60 domains just to reproduce bitsquatting.

Personally, if my partner dropped £1000 on something goofy like this, and all bills were paid, I'd probably cheer them on. There's nothing wrong with spending money on something that's got no purpose other than making people smile/laugh/what have you.

I genuinely wish more people saw life this way.

I hear so many people mull over money in finance forums, constantly saving every penny that is possible. If you go to finance forums of reddit or Dave Ramsey cult stuff you will even hear people brag about how they have more than a whole retirement's worth saved up yet continue to save and penny pinch. Why? It is ok to buy something because it makes you happy. Not everything needs a complicated pro/con list, a 30 day waiting period, and signed off approval from your partner.

It is one thing if you can't pay your bills. You should definitely pay those first. And of course put money towards savings and retirement each month. But don't stock all of your money away. You could die before using any of it.

I enjoy cycling. Road cycling and mountain biking. Anyone else who is in the sport knows that it gets expensive. Decent full suspension mountain bikes don't even start until about $3,000 nowadays. Mid-tier mountain bikes are priced around $5,000 - 6,000. A lot of people ask why I would spend that kind of money on a bike. "I could buy an old car for that" they often say. Great, then you go buy an old Honda civic, I don't really care that I "could" do that. I don't want an old car, I already have a good car. I want a nice mountain bike. I ride it 3-4 times a week and it makes me happy. Happier than watching Netflix, happier than playing a video game, happier than hiking. It makes me happy and if I can afford it, then I should reward myself. That is what life is all about.

If you enjoy cooking, go buy yourself some expensive ingredients to spoil yourself. If you love movies, treat yourself to some movies at the theaters.

Money management is like healthy eating. Eating too much is very bad for you, just like spending too much. But you can also over-correct with spending. Spending too little is just like eating too little, you can sometimes hurt yourself going the other way. I know people who take the financial FIRE principle too far. They stress about money that I know they can afford. They stress about going out to dinner one night a month because they only have $50 a month in their budget for eating out and now they are going to spend $70 this month. Why? Enjoy the fucking meal. Life is far too short. It's ok to spend money just for the enjoyment that it buys you. Your mental health will thank you.

I find the whole FIRE thing a little odd. Why would you spend your entire life on a short budget just to 'retire early'. Besides, how enjoyable is that retirement if you're constantly fighting to pinch every penny you can.

can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"

There's a PSA running on Australian radio these days that says if your spouse doesn't let you control your own money, that's a form of abuse. There's even a hotline to report that you're being abused.

(Heard it on 2GB/Sydney last week.)

The day I have to ask my significant other how to spend money I earn is the day I will quit that relationship. I get that some couples throw everything on a pile and go a pseudo-democratic way of spending things, but I have never understood this meme of males telling all the world that they have to ask their wives for permission to spend money. We're in the 21st century now. She is supposed to not be dependant on him, and the same should apply in reverse.

Find yourself a partner who will share in your enthusiasm.

From the looks of the author’s website, he very carefully time boxes his projects and weighs the expense and revenue generation. This is very different from spending a grand on something with unbounded time costs and no tangible return, like buying a boat.

Do you also ask your wife when you have to use a toilet?

Does it cost $1000?

I took a poll with a kid who said they thought an emoji email domain wasn’t smart. Up until that point, I’d been sold on it also.

There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan.

I think the OP is OK as it appears the IP addresses of both the A and MX records are located within Kazakhstan, but something to be aware of if you think registering a .kz is a fun idea(!) :-)

This is something to keep in mind with all TLDs really. They're not all created equal and can be subject to rules specific to their operators. Have to do your homework before you buy that cute domain.

Which OP didn't do multiple times and got his purchased annulled. But hopefully in the future, heh.

Like how many UK businesses and individuals had to give up their .eu domain name after leaving the EU.

I'm really surprised they didn't do the logical thing and grandfather all existing domains in when the UK left the EU.

It seems like the policy was simply designed to frustrate as many people as possible for no real gain for the EU.

It could be a fraud prevention and accidental legal misrepresentation defense mechanism to take away the .eu domains from the UK. If you go to a .eu domain and buy something you would expect not to be subject to import duties etc.

The EU continues to control .eu because it is available only to EU citizens. Nothing changed.

Your surprise exactly reflects the typical beliefs of a Brexit supporter, you thought the idea is you get to keep all the benefits you had before, and also you get rid of any downsides you didn't like, and somehow it's the EU's job to help you achieve this after you leave.

That didn't make any sense in 2016, and it still didn't make any sense in 2020, and so unsurprisingly here we are in 2021 and it isn't what happened. "We told you so" is boring but it's true. We told you so.

But this policy doesn't make sense for the EU either. They lose domain registration revenue. Thousands companies migrating to a new domain name will lead to confusion for EU citizens too, etc.

It just seems like a case of "we want it to be as painful as possible for you, even if we have to take a bit of additional pain for us too".

> They lose domain registration revenue.

But in the other scenario, they now have to deal with support queries ("why can they have a .eu when I can't?"), possibly legal action ("why can they have a .eu when I can't?"), etc.

A British business suing the EU in an EU court about a contract that explicitly says for EU members? Wouldn't go far.

> about a contract that explicitly says for EU members

...which would have some British businesses grandfathered in and therefore have a loophole that some enterprising lawyer can no doubt make a great deal of hay with.

> They lose domain registration revenue.

I think only micronations have a significant revenue coming from tlds (e.g. Tuvalu)

They maintain sovereignty though. That’s more important than domain registration revenue.

If I somehow owned tax.gov, and was running a tax prep service from it, I doubt the “I’m grandfathered” argument would fly.

It’s likely similar to lawyers.eu (I made that domain up), etc; people should be able to expect that to be an EU based service, not something overseas.

The idea is that (at least in theory) when someone has the .eu domain, then they are in EU.

There are many ways to skip it, but it blocks at least some.

That revenue is tiny compared to being able to say .eu domains for EU orgs and businesses.

And so it should be. The Brexit should be as painful as possible for the UK. The more the UK is reminded of what they gave up, and what they will be missing, the better, as it positions them better for reentry.

Who cares about domain registration revenue? The only reason it isn't free is because of the administrative hassle of distributing frivolous domain registrations.

If EU citizens are confused about UK companies disappearing, maybe they'll search and be exposed to EU competitors, how could that be a bad thing?

Fortunately most institutions of the EU are not as absurdly extremist as you are.

Preposterous isn't it?

Who hurt you?

The British?

Oh are you from .io originally? (TLD of British Indian Ocean Territory)

I mean, almost the whole point of the British is that they fucked over everybody. Americans, Chinese, Russians, Australians, Canadians, Indians, all have plenty to blame the British for.

Even a bunch of people who by rational assessment would count as British can reasonably say the British fucked them over because of a series of Tory policies, first destroying the paperwork which proves they came here by invitation (on the Empire Windrush and other ships), and then insisting that since they don't have that paperwork if they haven't already secured citizenship papers they were never authorised to be here and must be sent "home" - in some cases forcibly deported to countries they hadn't been to in more than half a century. See "Windrush scandal".

.EU has a functional purpose, and to grandfather in those names would lead to disruption of the functional meaning.

Think of it as a UX reason rather than financial.

Sure it does:

1. The .eu TLD is supposed to signify that a business using it is part of the EU. That means EU consumers will know that EU regulations such as GDPR apply, they're unlikely to pay import/export taxes, etc. Allowing non-EU businesses to use it dilutes the purpose and value of the TLD.

2. The EU wants to avoid making freeloading look like a viable strategy. If Britain is able to leave the EU and still reap all the benefits of being an EU member, then what's the point of other nations staying in the EU? Domain names are obviously only a minor benefit of being in the EU but there's a reason this policy is being applied mostly across the board.

I was unaware that such thing happened, and I'm kind of surprised as it sounds like somewhat un-EU-ish to me, but I obviously had the wrong sense of what is EU-ish. And I wholeheartedly support that. I mean, it makes sense. If the domain policy of *.eu says that it is for *.eu-based people and organizations, and you leave the EU, why the fuck should you keep it?

If EU wanted to make more money on it, it would have made it available for everyone from the start. If it doesn't... well, it just means domain-selling is not the core EU-business. So it's exactly one of the 2: either Russian and Japanese companies should be allowed to own *.eu domain, or British ones shouldn't. And I don't honestly care which one is it. But it cannot be both at the same time.

So, no, it's not about hurting you, it's simply about the fact that the world doesn't revolve around you. As surprising as it may sound.

Harsh. But fair.

The EU domain is available to EU residents and citizens, not just citizens. I as a British citizen and EU resident am entitled to one (not that I have bothered - someone got the one I wanted first :O )

I guess an EU citizen living in the UK could also hold them on behalf of UK based UK citizens. Thinking about it this situation does seem a little convoluted...

It might make sense for certain Internet resources to be made available only to citizens of some political region. It might make sense to revoke access to such resources if an individual renounced their citizenship or loses it due to their own actions (like, say, treason). But it really doesn’t make much sense that I could lose access to an arbitrary Internet resource I legitimately possessed because of large-scale political changes unrelated to my actions as an individual.

Both forms of Internet naming semantics make sense to me. Unfortunately, we've never reached any consensus or understanding at all about which apply where, or how to tell. That leaves us in this kind of crummy middle ground where different TLDs do or don't assert things about their registrants, to a degree that can change over time, and there's not an easy way to check. (You could read the NIC web site, if it's up-to-date, if it's in a language you speak, and if its stated policies actually correspond to its practices...)

It's not surprising at all that people's intuitions about a particular TLD would diverge. But it's sad, because it means the Internet naming system isn't working well in terms of the function of letting users know what particular names mean.

It's not crazy to imagine either a TLD that says "despite any possible appearances to the contrary, this is a first-come-first-served namespace in which names have no extrinsic meaning at all" or a TLD that says "this TLD is owned by entity X, and subdomains, like subdomains of a corporate or governmental network, are only given to persons with an appropriate relationship with entity X, and only during the term of that relationship". (Maybe even a TLD that says "notionally this TLD is about topic or group Y, but our rules about what that means are kind of idiosyncratic".) (But if there are TLDs in all these categories in the same DNS, both registrants and Internet users are probably going to be unsure which is which, as well as exactly what the TLDs in the third group "really" mean.)

> "After large-scale political changes I want there be no changes that might affect me personally."

.eu domain has certain registration requirements: - A Union citizen, independently of their place of residence. - A natural person who is not a Union citizen and who is a resident of a Member State. - An undertaking that is established in the Union. - An organization that is established in the Union, without prejudice to the application of national law.

Its completely normal for entities to stop servicing other entities after they aren´t in accordance of laws or rules.

.eu domain usage isn't that high, I don't think. I only have anecdata from my time in the UK, but .co.uk appears to be "the" domain to have in the UK.

From what I've seen the same is true on the continent. .fr and .de for example are highly popular in France and Germany. You rarely see local business reaching for .eu domains.

According to wikipedia, the number of affected domains is 344,584. Also compared to wiki there are 11M .uk domains and 16.5M .de domains. According to EurID[0] there are 3.7M .eu domains

[0]: https://eurid.eu/en/welcome-to-eurid/statistics/

Just a matter of getting a TTP / Intermediary to hold the domain for you in the EU, same as for the local presence requirements in for example .no(rway) and many other TLD's.

It's just another $10-20/year and fixes your 'problem'

Many domain registrars will offer this service, as 90+% of their clients will need it for these ccTLD's.

The most fun TLD is .su Someone on IRC managed to register "kremvax.su" a few years ago and gave anyone in the channel who wanted them email addresses (so I briefly had swiley@kremvax.su for example.)

Unfortunately the were asked for some documentation they couldn't provide a few months later and it got shut down.

Notion is frequently blocked because notion.so is a Somalian domain. Not really sure what they were thinking there...

> There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan.

Any country TLD is a potential risk that most western "entrepreneurs" blissfully ignore.

Just a month ago notion.so had troubles with it's domain because .so belongs to Somalia, and Somalia changed some rules around registration and ownership [1]

The same, really, goes for Tonga's http://dev.to, Libya's http://bit.ly or Greenland's http://goo.gl...

[1] https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1360239738020634629

Aka why I mainly stick with .com

The issue it that a lot of .com are taken so for the sake of a personal email address it is not ideal.

The person that owns "belval.com" literally registered it before I was born so I settled for "belval.org", "belval.me", "belv.al" but only the first one is accepted by most company.

Exactly, I too had to use .net & .us, because.com was registered in 1995.

All 4-letter .com's were taken as of 2013.

https://whoapi.com/blog/we-are-out-of-4-letter-com-domains/

I wonder how long until all 5- and 6- letter are gone.

My last name ends in al but the domain is taken. The .com one is taken by a guy who’s using it to showcase his Holocaust family tree (oddly enough his son had a run in with my sis a while back). I tried reaching out to him to see if he was interested in taking like .org but he’s not :( so I got .me

I offered $1k (there's nothing on belval.com) and belval.org to the owner of belval.com, he just replied to say "never contact me again" as if I was with the mob or something. It was a weird experience.

So weird. Why would you hold something without any plan to sell it, nor a thought towards using it?

Although .gl isn't much of a risk, as Google has some presence in Denmark and relations to the country.

But you shouldn't use TLDs of countries with which you have no affiliation.

Some extensions require presence in the EU, eg .eu & .it [0]

IOW not available to citizens or companies in Europe, but not member of the EU eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina

[0] Who can register a .it domain? https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/faq

The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.

I learned some countries have things like this after an article last month where someone traced an IP range used by palor or another organization like that to a country with similar rules, and filed a complaint with the company that leased it, who revoked the range. (Going from memory here, sorry if I'm getting things wrong).

Especially given Ive heard some of these TLDs are cheaper to encourage their use, people who want to run services on these should be careful even if enforcement is often lax or nonexistent until a complaint is filed.

Uh oh. How do I find rules for other domains? I went a little batty with the .de domain years ago and have quite a few. But, I'm not in Germany. While there is a mild ethical cringe at doing this, am I running afoul of some rules that might actually bite me later?

In general, Wikipedia has some starting points for all ccTLDs, for example for .de here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.de

The information on Wikipedia itself is mostly descriptive, while the registry website or other external links should have the actual rules and restrictions.

I find Gandi to have pretty thorough information on all TLDs they offer. The page for .de[1] lists one rule to keep in mind.

[1]: https://www.gandi.net/en-GB/domain/tld/de

I would recommend advertising that at https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/

the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere

hah

I was actually just thinking that he should probably register the [diamond][hands].kk domain, there's got to be some demand for it given how much it gets spammed over there.

Diamond hands appears to be taken everywhere listed by the mainstream emoji registration sites, sadly. It was a good idea

way ahead of you... OP was right, it was a pain to use that registrar.

https://xn--tr8hi8e.kz/

that was quick

OP sort of deserves this. His little commercial there shows the diamond hands emoji but he never registered it

> The offical site for diamond hands

> Money printer go brrr. fuck them paper hands

Flawless. I couldn't have expected anything more from this site. It perfectly met my expectations.

wrong emoji... this is it http://.kz

The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'

This is art. I worked as a cashier for a couple years, and this feels like a fever dream about those days.

Sample size dichotomy.

From a customer's perspective, this is the way everyone does things. (Sample size: themselves)

From a cashier's perspective, this weirdo is a few standard deviations outside the mean. (Sample size: 1,000+ customers)

I use an email address that ends in .io and the amount of people that still ask me ".io? are you sure that's correct?" never ceases to amaze me.

Mine ends in .by as my surname does as well and people still say "Is that it?"

EG if my surname was "Gummersby" my email domain is "Gummers.by"

If your surname contains an "a", say Gaddersby, you could also do "g@dders.by" to confuse people even more

Try spelling that, though. :)

I have purchased some domains for myself and my friends based on that rule, like rubinste.in, fedorovi.ch, or oba.ma (not real names). They thought it's cute but didn't hold them for long.

A friend with a last name that ends in ..skova wasn't so lucky as Vatican doesn't sell domain names.

Hell, booking.com will even tell you that "your address looks incorrect" (sometimes, I got it once out of two bookings made on a single day), if you dare to use your own domain .com. They used to nag me about "ohh, are you sure it's not tadzik_@gmail.com"? And I'm not sure what's worse.

It does work well. I used a customized version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck on an ecomm website and the amount of bounces due to typos went way down.

It is important to tune it a bit based on what you see after installing it to reduce the amount of bad suggestions.

You got nothing on my firstname@lastname.technology email.

Can't register at half the sites, and if you can register sometimes you can't log in. Banana Republic, in particular, lets me log in through one login flow, but not the one that's integrated into the checkout process.

Ah! What a coincidence — I registered my Banana Republic account with a gmail "+" email (eg, my_email+bananarepublic@gmail.com) as is my standard practice with retail accounts, and I have the same login issues. It's quite odd, but I'm glad it's not just me!

Wallethub let me register email+wh@gmail.com but did not allow + sign in login. Cant signup again with email@gmail.com Had to ask support to fix that.

If they’re just warning but letting you proceed, that’s fine. They do that because they see looooots of people screwing up their own email addresses in a few common ways. Run any email signup with a general audience and any kind of volume and you’ll end up doing the same, to reduce the load on support.

Same using me@domain.cricket or similar. "Do you mean me@domain.com?"

צדיק גמור אתה!

Try using a .Irish domain

Yeah. Try using wildcard email accounts together with a uncommon TLD, and people ask me if I work at their place all the time.

Last time I booked a car at Hertz:

> Me: My email is hertz@capableweb.work

> Agent: Woah, you work here at Hertz? That's so cool

> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?

So many email validations fail with a uncommon gTLD that I started switching everything to a .com domain instead. Sometimes I even get rejected when my email address contains the company name... "Sorry, your email seems invalid" is all I get, but changing one letter of the company name makes it pass the validation...

Same experience, though I never tried to get a discount out of it.

In that case she tried to apply the discount via my email or something like that, but she said it failed. I blamed on it that I was a new employee and I'm a rush, so nevermind, let's proceed normally.

I'm not sure I would actually accept it if it went through, but I'm always curious to see if it works sometime.

From doing agency/marketing work for numerous large corps, I can tell you that many have a straight up block on corpname on any email name or domain to prevent phishing.

Yes, I recently got a new chromecast, which now requires a google account to set up via the google home app. I knew I was never going to use this single-purpose account for anything real so I decided to make the name very descriptive and tried to put “googlehome” in the identifier but google would not let me get away with the string “google” anywhere in it. Ended up with “GewgleHome.”

I've never seen that and I have dozens of company@me.example emails signed up.

As a security person its hard as heck training (some of) our users to understand how basic domain formats work. We use a phishing simulation service, and outside of certain content,putting part or all of our company name in the domain but adding other words/underscores/etc is what tricks a lot of people. I tend to explain how it works in a basic format, and often you can see the light bulb go off when I point out how a subdomain works and why an underscore or dash creates a whole new domain anybody can register while a subdomain is something our company can only create/use (mind you, I'm not going to confuse them by explaining how this can be abused, these people i talk to about this are having enough trouble grasping the basics).

As a human who had to describe the internet, computers and email addresses to some of our older population, I agree, stuff is really hard for newcomers. Most of them barely understand the mouse abstraction, so getting them to understand some of the finer details of the modern computing world is a exercise in humongous patience.

This stuff is not really well made for normal people, to be honest. Just look at all the discussions and troubles (tickets, misunderstandings, security risks) related to email and hyperlink parsers..

It took me a while to know that FQDNs can (and sometimest must?) start at root with a period, meaning every address you've ever typed could have finished with a period (news.ycombinator.com.) and I recall some newspaper (NYT? News Yorker?) failing to test for that when people want to bypass their paywall. And this is a valid email address apparently: #!$%&’*+-/=?^_`{}|~@example.com

RFCs/codified norms by tech people are just weird to normal people.

Please stop downvoting this. If not an unpleasant truth, it's at least a widely held perception, which must have a reason. (And I suspect that reason is because it's true ...)

> this is a valid email address apparently: #!$%&’*+-/=?^_`{}|~@example.com

If so, that's actually the same as #!$%&’*@example.com (mail user 'foo+bar' is the same as 'foo'). Many webforms/DBs don't know that.

> If so, that's actually the same as #!$%&’*@example.com (mail user 'foo+bar' is the same as 'foo'). Many webforms/DBs don't know that.

Actually, no. To the best of my knowledge (and I'd be delighted to be corrected!), that's merely a convention that lots of providers (including GMail) conform to, but it's not part of the RFC or standards.

Don't get me wrong - it irritates me when that very-common behaviour isn't supported (and, at the very least, `+` shouldn't be considered an illegal character). But it's also technically-not-wrong to consider `a+1@test.com` as different from `a@test.com`.

You are right. In fact, RFC 5321 specifically forbids you from interpreting the local part of an address in any way.

> the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

See your sibling comment for another perspective! (EDIT: which, to be clear, doesn't invalidate your point. Though it's worth considering, I guess, whether "only assigned semantics by the host specified in the domain" prevents user-tracking systems from calling "foo+bar@gmail.com" the same user as "foo@gmail.com". After all - if they're being interpreted "as" user IDs, rather than as emails, does that really breach the RFC?)

It's not really a different perspective. Sieve, which the sibling comment's RFC extends, is a mail-filtering script language for end-user inboxes. So it's perfectly reasonable for a user on foo.com, who knows that foo.com supports the `+` syntax, to write a Sieve script directing mail to "username+blah@foo.com" to a particular inbox.

In fact, that RFC specifically calls out that interpreting the `+` on non-local addresses is likely wrong:

> NOTE: Because the encoding of detailed addresses are site and/or implementation specific, using the subaddress extension on foreign addresses (such as the envelope "from" address or originator header fields) may lead to inconsistent or incorrect results.

EDIT to address your second point:

> After all - if they're being interpreted "as" user IDs, rather than as emails, does that really breach the RFC?

Well, technically no, the RFC is about SMTP so if you're not writing an SMTP implementation, you're not breaching it.

But RFCs aren't the law, so whether you're technically breaching it isn't really what's relevant. What _is_ relevant is that a system that treats foo+bar@quux.com the same as foo@quux.com is making assumptions about how email works that contradict the RFCs that define how email works. Whether that's a useful thing to do in practice is an engineering decision with tradeoffs. E.g., it's probably fine to assume it for a whitelisted set of domains where you know it to be true, like gmail.

It's explicitly called out in RFC5233, at least: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233

TIL, thank you!

> I recall some newspaper (NYT? News Yorker?) failing to test for that when people want to bypass their paywall.

For a long time I could access Bloomberg for free because they failed open when you did this

This root period was mentioned on reddit a while ago because the domain "youtube.com." would fail to serve ads.

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/gzr3cq/fyi_you_can_...

I registered .com domains with my kids' names when they were born, and when one of them discovered that they could get the email address gmail@hisname.com he was stoked. His friends don't understand how it's possible for that email address to work. As a practical joke, he always says "what do you mean? Doesn't gmail@yourname.com not work too?"

Somewhat similar to this... My full name is Tambe Barsbay, so I bought the domain mbebarsbay.com and have t@mbebarsbay.com as my email.

Be careful using illegitimate car rental codes. Sometimes they look so cheap because they cancel a lot of your insurances, because your employer carries those insurances itself. So if you crash or the car is damaged, the clerk says, “Don’t worry Hertz Corporate will pick that up” but of course when they discover you are not an employee they will not.

I'm sorry, did you reply to the wrong comment? I'm trying to understand where "illegitimate car rental codes" comes from here, as I never mentioned that or anything related to it.

I agree with you, just trying to understand how it's connected to what I wrote initially.

They are referencing the line about the employee discount.

They are talking about this line:

> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?

Which suggests that you would/did ask for (an employee) discount code when renting from that company.

If you use a discount code, say the Boeing discount code when you rent at Seattle Airport, Hertz will cancel any insurance off the price because Boeing covers those risks itself for its employees. But, if you’re not a Boeing employee and you crash, you’re not insured by Boeing and you’re not insured by Hertz.

No one wants car rental insurance anyway.

Especially not Hertz, who doesn't honor claims anyway and is thankfully bankrupt.

I fucked up a truck and they covered it without questions, I guess their customer experience was highly variable.

My favourite is when the validation rejects anything with the service name in the email. I wonder whether it's to prevent somebody registering <anything>@<service> as a joke, or a really bad attempt at preventing <service>@mailinator.

It's because it is a common spam action to use <site>@<free_email> when blasting out stuff. It's also common to try and use <something>@<site> in either/or the to/reply-to fields for spambots.

So, it is easier to blacklist it altogether.

Well that would have caused me problems when Oracle started requiring registration for some form of Java downloads.

They haven't spammed that though, I don't think I've ever received any actual email to the "oracleblowsgoats" address. Probably keeps any sales droids from even bothering with me as well.

Aw man, this exact situation happened to me last time I rented a car with Sixt. I wish I had thought of this genius line of yours,

> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?

Sooo… did it work?

On just meeting a girl in school whose last name was the first name of a lead actor in a popular TV show, I started blurting out “Are you related to X” and my brain was already sending X to my mouth before I realized no, stupid, that’s not how names work.

Turns out she’s a nice girl, and she answered happily, “no, but that would be cool”. I smiled back while I died a little inside.

It’s always possible the person figures out this is not right before they get to the juicy bit. But I’ve been wrong before.

My spouse got that a lot growing up, sadly she now sometimes gets another one since she took my last name. Thankfully the new actor is not very relevant anymore so it doesn't happen often.

I once owned "firstname.to" I figured it would be easy to tell people my email is firstname@firstname.to and have them use it, spell it right, and remember it.

Nope. It confused the hell out of people.

I wrote libvldmail for that: https://github.com/dertuxmalwieder/libvldmail

Sadly, it is poorly adopted.

My domain ends in .me which according to Aliexpress is not real. So instead of me having to manually unsubscribe, they got sent to the huge spam box that is gmail.

A ton of services kindly ask me if my personal domain on .me TLD is correct one, but at least they don't block me from using it.

My domain ending in .in is not supported by Discover Bank because it can be used only "in" India.

Which reminds me, I used to use me@myname.com but gmail’s UI gets weird when viewing emails from me as it uses “me” to indicate the owner of the gmail account.

ok, ok, but is that really correct?! ;)

I use hello@firstmiddlelast.com

I also have firstmiddlelast@gmail.com, and about half the time I tell someone my email address, the send it to the gmail one.

For me, they send emails at mydomain.com@gmail.com

Ah jeez, maybe they do that to me, too, and I just don't know it?

I know because I registered an actual mydomain.com@gmail.com name too.

I use first@firstlast.com and wasn't able to get the firstlast@gmail.com so I guess I'm just hoping I'm getting all my email. I will say that having my name be my email makes life /so much/ easier. Especially over the phone, "Yes, my email is first@firstlast.com, just like the name I just told you and/or is already on your screen when you pulled up my account".

Sometimes it is better not to be too clever. I built a CRM like app for the construction industry and used "inc.construction" and "inc.services" as the app domain. So customer would have

<business-name>.inc.construction

I thought it was clever, but people do not understand them. Everything is .com in their mind.

Just FYI, .io is the TLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has a less than savoury history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

Please don't tell me there exists genuine attempts to "cancel" the .io domain.

Owning a .io domain is taking part directly in the enslaving and poisoning of the island's native /s

Not everything has to be “cancelled” but if you are buying a domain, you should probably inform yourselves of what that TLD represents since people you’re communicating with might and might not look too favorably on its use.

Yeah, .io represents “Input/Output” as much as .net represents “Network”

Domains often have little connection to their intended meaning.

Let's say you're running a startup and decided to be hip and get an io domain. You reach out to a potential major client who happens to be of Chagossian descent.

They probably wouldn't care for your interpretation of the domain, they just see you supporting the people who relocated their entire group of people from their native homeland.

So, yes, you should be well aware of what the io domain represents and who you're supporting when buying one. Because it might bite you in the ass down the line and could have easily been avoided by just getting a different one without a storied past.

No "cancelling" going on, but just like a lot of other things, it's a risk that should be taken into account.

> they just see you supporting the people who relocated their entire group of people from their native homeland.

I'll take "Things that you'll never have to worry about IRL for 1000$ Alex" This reads like satire. What cross-circles of people who happen to recognize the .io and know its associated with a TLD for a country or nation and also happen to not know it's other innate purpose of representing input/output? This is as ridiculous as worrying about having a brand with a .tv domain and a negative perception of those from the Tuvalu island.

Sorry maybe I missed the memo, but is this how things get “cancelled”?

I was just pointing out that the domain is tied to a sad history.

At no point do I advocate for/against using it, nor did I pass any judgment on people who choose to use it.

The only opinion expressed in my comments is that the way the British and American governments have behaved is bad. If you take issue with that, let’s discuss but please don’t put words in my mouth.

> is this how things get “cancelled”

Yes, associating tangentially-related controversies with previously innocuous topics is how things get canceled. Bringing up topics like this on a post about emoji emails implies that you want the conversation to flow in a certain direction; that's how conversation works. It's only missing Twitter and the word "problematic."

Are you cancelling free speech?

Since at least 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8587379

Mine ends in .sexy, the looks I get are even better than when I used my .io one ;p and then if they follow up for my phone number it gets even better when I tell them as it ends in 6969.

Is it by chance 420-6969?

I wish, but that is now my goal to find that number! https://howlett.sexy/ its over on here if you want to see ;p

Your web page font is unreadably thin.

Thanks!

My domain has a hyphen in it and I find places that reject it all the time.

I have a very short .co - gets 'em every time.

Its 2021 and I am just finding people that treat .co emails as normal and don't mentally overwrite that as .com and create a typo

For services that actually require correspondence, I register the cool fun tld and a seperate .com for email

This also lets mailing lists het marked as spam without harming the deliverability of the other

I have a simple email address:

firstname @ (nickname for firstname) + (last initial) .net

And it's amazing how hard it is to explain this to people over the phone or in store for email receipts, etc.

I'm shocked how few folks seems to be vaguely aware that .net as TLD exists even though it's one of the original TLDs from when they were first created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net

Yes, I just posted something similar. My domain is initial + surname, and the most common response I get when giving my email is that the person hasn't heard of "that one" before.

To make matters worse, I chose a slightly uncommon tld.

Besides lots of other adresses i have forname @ forname-surname .de as an adress easy to understand. I totally understand your problems, I have this even with people who already have forename and surname on their screens, it's ridiculous.

I have 2 email addresses because of that. I thought it would be good to have my and address at my own domain but if I could go back in time I would tell myself to just stick with the gmail address. For anything where I can type in my email address, it's fine. But if someone asks for it verbally, I just give them the gmail address because firstnamelastname@gmail.com requires no extra clarification.

Mine is my name, like john@jsmith.com. The number of people who exclaim "I've never heard that one before!" surprises me. Obviously other people don't use it, because it's my name.

My spouse, who does not work in an IT/software related field, has an email address that is firstname@lastname.com and quite a large number of people refuse to believe that such a thing is possible. There has been more than one instance where some person treated them as if they were so clueless that they didn't know how to properly format an email address.

By the way, we already have an "emoji button" on our keyboards: on Windows, it's the Win+. keystroke. Try it if your Windows 10 is updated enough.

A couple of alternatives for Linux users.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBus#Emoji_input

The kitty terminal emulator supports this out of the box (it also works on two other platforms):

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Ctrl+Shift+U opens a Unicode input panel with fuzzy search by symbol code or name.

GNOME has Ctrl+period.

Does it? I am in stock gnome and this shortcut isn't bound by default. What distro are you using?

I believe it has to be a GTK app - which almost none of the things I use on a daily basis are. Try in gedit or something like that.

My daily drivers are IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome, and Terminator so it's not super useful to me... :'(

Oh wow, you are totally right, that does work in GTK apps. My daily drivers are about the same :(

Check out this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1162/emoji-selector/

It implements a system level emoji keyboard that you can trigger with <Super + e>. It works pretty great and on all apps, I use it a lot.

KDE has one, too. Not sure what the default was, I remapped it to Super+Period

I use KDE and I've never tried it before. Win+. works!

It doesn't do anything for me. Can you point to a doc?

I use Compose key for this, surprised nobody mentioned it here yet. This way it works in all X11 apps (Sway supports this out of the box as well), with no need for extra software or some specific desktop environment.

Just put something like

  <Multi_key> <semicolon> <parenright>  : ""
  <Multi_key> <t> <u>                   : ""
  <Multi_key> <t> <d>                   : ""

in your ~/.XCompose.

Yes, you have to put all the emojis you want there manually, but I use very few of them so it works for me.

EDIT: HN removed the emojis from my snippet. The double quotes there contained smiling face, thumb up, and thumb down.

My n00buntu derivative has some emojis and other logograms out of the box, eg. lines 326–337 of /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose:

  <Multi_key> <C> <C> <C> <P>             : ""   U262D # HAMMER AND SICKLE
  <Multi_key> <O> <A>                     : "Ⓐ"   U24B6 # CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
  <Multi_key> <less> <3>                  : "♥"   U2665 # BLACK HEART SUIT
 
  <Multi_key> <colon> <parenright>        : ""   U263A # WHITE SMILING FACE
  <Multi_key> <colon> <parenleft>         : ""   U2639 # WHITE FROWNING FACE
  <Multi_key> <backslash> <o> <slash>     : ""      # PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION
 
  <Multi_key> <p> <o> <o>                 : ""  U1F4A9 # PILE OF POO
 
  <Multi_key> <F> <U>                     : ""  U1F595 # REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED
  <Multi_key> <L> <L> <A> <P>             : ""  U1F596 # RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS

Unbutchered: http://ix.io/2SsC

Oh, those are in Debian, as a matter of fact!

https://github.com/kragen/XCompose for those who prefer a more methodical approach.

https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji

And another character picker for Rofi:

https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji/

There's also https://github.com/salty-horse/ibus-uniemoji if you want something a little more interactive.

I wrote https://github.com/sphaerophoria/ibus-memebox for myself because I wasn't quite happy with the performance of any of the solutions I found.

Win+Period or Win+Semicolon

<-- Yes!

Edit: Alas, it does not work on HN. Pity.

Where does this work?

Literally everywhere. HN just strips out emojis from posts, because they're obnoxious.

Unless, apparently, you're trying to post your sweet new email address. Honest question: if this takes off, do you think HN will stop stripping them?

No. Because

1) it won't take off 2) punycode 3) other reasons

For other readers: emoji keyboard is ctrl + cmd + space on macOS.

Not always; that's app-specific, not a system-wide setting.

I think it is system-wide. At least I've not encountered any input field where it doesn't work. Even Microsoft Office, which uses its own input routines, supports it.

It's a shortcut to an Edit menu item within the application, so whatever shortcut the app gives it; e.g. in Firefox it appears to be simply Cmd-<space>.

But wait... that doesn't actually work (it just switches to the next input layout). Maybe that depends on my keyboard settings in System Preferences. Or maybe it's just a Firefox bug.

Cmd-space launches Spotlight. Ctrl-space switches the input layout. Ctrl-Cmd-Space launches the emoji viewer (even in Firefox...)

Not for me. (I suspect the details of this vary between system versions, and they certainly depend on settings chosen in System Preferences / Keyboard / Shortcuts.)

Works fine for me in latest Firefox. I've never had it not work in a specific app. Though, sometimes the keyboard crashes and doesn't come back up until a restart (that could be the fault of my Ryzen Hackintosh, though).

What exactly works in Firefox -- is it Command-Control-Space or just Command-Space?

Cmd + space brings up spotlight, as it always has. Cmd + ctrl + space brings up the emoji keyboard.

Perhaps you have some forgotten keybindings, because that's the case on every macOS device I own.

It's the standard behavior. If you do something to modify or override it of course it won't work, but that's like changing the keyboard to Dvorak and saying that pressing the g key gives an i instead so you can't count on getting a g when you press the g key.

It's standard for Cocoa-based apps, I think, but it doesn't appear among the system-wide shortcuts in System Preferences on my Big Sur system, at least. The only shortcuts offered under Input Sources there are to select the previous or next input source (which are set to Cmd-Space, Cmd-Opt-Space).

A command to open the Emoji & Symbols palette is generally at the end of each application's Edit menu, and that's where its shortcut appears. But in current Firefox the item in the Edit menu shows the shortcut as Cmd-Space (not Cmd-Ctl-Space), and it doesn't work for me because the system-wide shortcut takes precedence.

If I disable that shortcut in System Preferences (which may well be the default, particularly if multiple input methods are not enabled), then Cmd-Space does work in Firefox to bring up the Emoji palette -- but note that it's not the standard Cmd-Ctl-Space combination.

It doesn't work in every app sadly. Qt based apps for example

Hmm, I guess I've never used any Qt-based apps.

I use two now, Quassel which is an IRC client, and QtPass which is a password manager. Both are cross-platform which is great because I don't use just Mac. I use pretty much everything. Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD.

That means most of the built-in facilities of the Mac (like iCloud Keychain) are no good for me. Because they only work on Apple OSes.

But anyway both these apps don't support this. When I press the keystroke, nothing happens. I suppose it only works for apps that use the native text input boxes, or that have built specific support for the feature like browsers.

In my password manager I can do without Emoji, though it allows for text comments and it would be handy there. In IRC it's quite handy to have the option these days.

On macOS I use Rocket [0]. It's not perfect but it's the best I've used and it does make finding the emoji you want pretty easy. You can add custom alias/shortcuts for the emojis and you can also use it to insert images/gifs from the searcher.

[0] https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/

The globe button on newer Macs can be retasked to call up the emoji input panel (I guess any button could be before with custom keyboard shortcuts but now it's a simple dropdown in keyboard preferences.)

Holly mothballs. I didn't know this trick. Works in Slack as well.

That UI is hilarious (for a given value of hilarious) in the sense that the search for emojis uses whichever input language you're using, even if your UI language is something else.

So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.

The default Android keyboard has similar behaviour. I was learning Spanish so I switched my phone to Spanish then back in English at some point later. Yet the change never propagated to the keyboard for some reason so my emojis are still in Spanish.

eggplants in Spanish

la berenjena

The iOS and I believe macOS emoji picker let’s you use any language to search for emojis. ハート brings up hearts for example.

But you have to switch to that language first.

For example on my iPhone if I type in Norwegian and jump to emoji then I can type “hjerte” and find the heart. But if I type “heart” then there are no results when the language is Norwegian. So if I want to search for emojis by English name, then I must first ensure that my keyboard is in English. And this is good I think, but wanted to point it out.

On my phone at least (latest iOS) it will search any installed keyboard languages.

I originally thought the typing didn't work at all, because the couple of times I tried pressing Win+. the emoji UI came up, and it said "Keep typing to find an emoji", but nothing happened when I typed.

Turns out the search only works when you have a text entry area selected elsewhere.

If your Windows isn't updated enough, grab AutoHotkey[0], and try this: [1]. It's a little "emoji keyboard" I wrote a few years ago, to insert most important emojis into team conversations. Globally binds itself to F2, and it's ergonomic. You press F2, then number, then CTRL+V (that last step could be automated too).

The script is easy to extend with new emojis, and also supports selecting alternatives based on which program you had focus on when invoking the keyboard - you can see it using Skype-specific notation for Skype.

[0] - https://www.autohotkey.com/ - it's the keyboard rebinding / advanced automation platform for Windows. Literally the first thing I install on a new Windows machine (mostly for rebinding Caps Lock to Ctrl).

[1] - https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/d330edccf8ba9a2b13d01b4e7f1...

Thanks, did not know this. In fact, learned both Win + plus (and discovered Win + minus along the way) as well as Win + dot :)

> Try it if your Windows 10 is updated enough

And if it's not, please go update your Windows. You should not be reading HN with out outdated operating system.

laughs in Windows 7

There is an actual emoji button on new dell keyboards as well as a lock button. Not just a repurposed FN key but really a separate key with a smiley on it and one with a lock next to it. Both work without extra drivers in Windows 10.

Do you know if this key produces the regular shortcut for invoking the emoji input method in Windows, or if it has its own key code?

Not sure. And I only know how to figure that out in Linux but it's my windows work computer. Is there a windows method to see what key code the keyboard is sending?

On my work computer on Win10 it just opens up the magnifier :(

it's <winkey> AND <periodkey>. I tried <winkey> AND <pluskey> the first time too :)

right, okay, robert@xn--ds8h.kz, got it. thanks, Punycode!

Come to HN for the news, stay for the short fiction. Well done.

>> Maybe the floor can be a table

Why wouldn’t you throw stuff all over the floor. It’s the biggest shelf in the room.

Very well written.

Bill burr on his podcast was talking about, when he first discovered reddit. He couldn't understand what it was... He then realized later.. "it's a site for people that really like to type.. that's what it is.."

I like to think of Wikipedia as a site for people who like to correct other people.

"Well actually..." given form.

I'd never actually tried to describe Reddit so succinctly; in the same vein as yours, maybe Reddit is just Jeopardy where every comment must be in the form of a correction.

Perfectly accurate or not, I think the venn-diagram of "People unlikely to already know what Reddit is" overlaps heavily with "People who know and understand what Jeopardy is", making it an excellent analogy :)

Oh, that cuts to the quick.

This is brutal, and potent. Nicely done.

One of my favorite reddit shower thoughts:

"Wikipedia built the biggest modern information hub using nothing but nerds' need to correct each other."

It's really quite astonishing how powerful a force that is, and how well Wikipedia channels it toward something good!

There should be a museum for those kinds of HN thread comments.

This kind of prose is truly hilarious.

Thank you.

Brilliant!

Haha. This is halfway between psychedelic and hyper realistic in a way that made me think of Thomas Pynchon.

Maybe the whole covid thing lowered my happiness-level standards, but I find this charming.

Also I would be scared to receive actual money from people for something as out of my control as email. I hope the author doesn't get hit by a wave of "my emoji emails are not being delivered to @commercial-behemoth or @government-branch and I've made my emoji adress my main one and it's all your fault" a few months down the line.

The emoji part is charming.

The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!

Personal preferences aside, the original article [0] on the Netflix and Facebook domains gives context which is no less charming, at least on ethical grounds.

Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want."

[0] https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy

The clever part about this is they don't deal with deliverability at all. This is only for incoming email.

My hat off to tinyprojects. This is a very cool project and I'm so happy to see they wrote this at the end:

> But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.

Apparently I run https://hanami.run an email forwarding service and I also say that

https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future

> At the same time, we like to make email more fun. We are commited to build tools that help you process email easily. Your banks don’t have an API to help you build a real-time activity tracker? Just use email.

Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build https://pix.fastloop.xyz where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site.

I'm thinking about comment for a static site. Simply send an email to a magic address to comment? Similar to news letter? Anyone like this idea

Do you have some protection filters on for https://pix.fastloop.xyz?

I cautiously opened the site and was basically prepared to be greeted with (child) pornography. How do you prevent that?

I rely on email spam filterting, which seems effectively filter out them. No sophisicated filtering yet. I didn't advertise it anywhere outside of Hacker News and not many people know about it yet.

>https://pix.fastloop.xyz

Nice but I see some risks there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)

wow, thanks so much for that information. I'll have it migrate to some different domain.

It works. But what is it for? How do other people interact with it and the images?

I like the commenting idea.

This service should come with a big fat warning that the emoji email addresses should never be used for anything remotely serious.

Running an email service is not, by any means, a 'tiny project'. I would never pay, nor rely on an e-mail service that is effectively a one-men side project.

I just took a quick check on the 'mailbox' domain (I can't paste emoji here on HN). There seems to be no DMARC, no MTA-STS and no TLS-reporting set up for these domains. The SPF record allows a single /48 (65k) IPv6 block of addresses to send email on behalf of the domain. The MX does not seem to support TLS. The SPF record seems to be added at the '@' domain, so it is returned on every query, even where it is not supposed to be returned, so you can be sure DKIM will fail (you did set up DKIM, did you?). Just to name a few issues.

But even if implemented perfectly, there are a lot of 'enterprise' email 'solutions' out there that are not even close to implementing even the most basic of RFCs. Do not expect them to support punycode. Do not expect your emoji email to de deliverable to any of these services.

This service doesn’t support even sending, just receiving. So I don’t think there is DKIM even considered.

Or SPF for that matter.

It should have an SPF record saying nobody can send as that domain.

It says send support is 'coming soon' on the website, so expectations are already set for those paying for this service.

It needs DKIM so other people cannot send e-mail pretending to be you.

I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't expect something like this to work reliably.

He advertised it to a general audience on tic tok,and it is a service people pay for. Why would they not expect it to work? That makes no sense to me. It seems that way because you understand how dysfunctional email is. I would be upset if I bought a service for something I don't understand that is normally completely functional and free and when I relied on it it broke only for people who understand it to laugh at me because I should have just known that vendor was unreliable.

emojis break lots of things. Most people probably aren't surprised when using emojis in passwords doesn't work well either.

What you say is entirely true. But in practice, this is for fun, no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important. But it's great to have an emoji email to give to medium when they ask for it? Isn't that great.

> no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important

I disagree.

We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this. But any non-technical person who sees 'get a next-gen email addresses' being advertised for 9,99/year will expect more. A lot more.

Do not underestimate how naive and demanding consumers can be.

Thank you for open my mind. I see your point now.

Caveat emptor

And for a long time, no one used email for anything important.

Very few new things emerge feature-complete.

It amazes me how people on HN can handwave away these huge concerns. Have you met human beings? The users just sees "email" and thinks it's exactly like gmail except with a funky emoji in it. It's only a matter of time before someone tries to pay their taxes with this.

How do you pay your taxes with email?

They probaly means we use that email address when paying taxes so notification/receipt etc will be send to that email address.

You know what breaks, in human beings' experiences?

Everything. All the time.

So the holier-than-thou, thou-shall-not-deploy-less-than-perfect perspective is pretty irrelevant.

This is a side project. That did something neat. The author should be commended, not lambasted for not rebuilding Gmail on their own.

And God knows the Internet would be a better place with a little more weirdness again.

I dont think they are being lambasted, they should just put a warning on their site. Email is a very messed up ecosystem, and people who use email don't understand that. This is very cool, there should just be a disclaimer that this is a side project and will break often. Email is notoriously a pain in the ass if it's a full time job, much less a side project that's losing money. He's not selling this to quirky techies, his primary advertisement was tic tok. That's kind of irresponsible to not warn people this should just be for fun.

You're not wrong per se, but rather: there should just be a disclaimer on Email that this is a very messed up ecosystem and will break often. It's not specific to xn--ds8h.kz et al.

Yep, this is going to bomb big time in the next year or even less. No doubt there will be fodder for another HN post..

I've become a big fan of structuring onboarding in a way that makes problem customers never complete. Maybe the OP should think about how to do that here

That's what Dogecoin's creator said. 7 years later it sits at 7 Billion $ market cap and it is a big deal.

After all, people pay money to obtain these. Why anybody paying a subscription fee would expect that the product is useless?

And soon to be the official currency of Starbase, Texas. Apparently. Although I might be misinterpreting Musk's tweet. He definitely said Dodge though.

That is all until The Queen snatches up that reserved Liz@[crown].kz, after that the MI5 will buy and run the [union-jack].uk for all governmental parties and typing in very.important.person@parliament.uk istead of [serious-face-with-a-tie]@[big-ben] will be considered rude in high circles, believe me that!

;)

> This service should come with a big fat warning that the emoji email addresses should never be used for anything remotely serious.

I don't know, we said the same thing about jeans.

If enough people start using it, the big email providers will follow, or the new service will get around to fixing it.

It’ll work out either way.

I’m not going to shed a tear for gmail if they have to start putting up with someone else’s busted non-standard email infrastructure. They should be able to get what they give.

>They should be able to get what they give.

Except, that will never happen. What's more likely, Gmail changes what they do to accomodate some goofy emoji system, or users of some goofy emoji system get frustrated about it's incompatibility and stop using it because it is so frustrating? I'm not talking about tech nerds on HN or the likes. I'm talking about FOMO/YOLO types that think it's "cool", but then new shiny happens, and they just forget about. One group significantly outnumbers the other.

If you know so much about this stuff instead of criticizing, offer to help for a consulting fee and get your own paragraph in the next update to this story

I love the idea of a positive (yet critical) feedback loop instead of the tone on display here.

'Serious', 'enterprise'.. and email addresses ending in star emoji, eggplant emoji.. wonder how that venn diagram would look like..

Yes but yourname@[computer] is quite appealing for a dev. I already bought it from OP

You sound fun

DMARK, DKIM, and SPF are only for sending. Mailoji doesn't support sending yet.

TLS and MTA-STS are for receiving and would be good to set up, eventually.

This is a fun hack, but there is no way I would get involved in providing any form of commercial email service for $1440 arr. I wouldn't do it for $1440 a _day_. Everything involved with email is pain. I wish you luck.

> Everything involved with email is pain.

Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.

What would you have done differently?

Probably not run an email server. =[

Note that OP is actually generating loss at this point - 300 domains at $8 equals $2400, which is in itself bigger than the income.

Can you maybe share what problems OP might have? I have toyed with an idea of starting something similar and would love to know what I'm getting into.

That was before HN though! You have any idea how many eggplant emoji handles he’s sold since?

I've attempting something similar before so here's a non-exhaustive list of problems from the top of my head:

1. Getting to send email, at all: lots of hosting providers blacklist outgoing port 25 TCP specifically to prevent random people getting their IPs put on a spam blacklist

2. Getting your IPs de-blacklisted: unless you get really lucky whatever IP you _start_ with has a good chance of already being on several blacklists, and some make it stupidly hard to get your IP off the list even if the ban was from 5 years ago by whoever had the IP back then

3. To even have a chance of your emails being deliverable you have to understand and configure reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC (and probably a few other I've forgotten or which have been invented since I tried this)

4. Even after you get this far, major providers like gmail are likely to send your email straight to /dev/null because you're a new provider with no reputation

5. If (or more accurately when) somebody manages to abuse your service to send a ton of spam you'll get re-blacklisted and have to fix that all over again and implement/fix spam filters to stop people like this (this will probably happen several times as you constantly attempt to battle spammers)

6. You're going to want some sort of incoming spam filter, because people don't really like spam in their inbox, and most existing open source and/or free solutions are mediocre at best

7. If you use a weird TLD (i.e. not .com/.org/.net/similar) random online business will not allow your email or not send to you properly, and your customers will blame you despite you being able to do almost nothing about it

8. Even if you use a "standard" TLD to get past 7 some particularly bad actors will use a email domain _whitelist_, so only gmail and friends are allowed, and again your users will blame you

Depends. If he is actually running only a forwarder , it is much easier than running an full fledged service with mailboxes and other support.

Running a 'forwarder' still means that you have manage the MTAs, and all the infrastructure around it. It's still a lot of work.

> Everything involved with email is pain

Agree. Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements you still need to spend a lot of time overseeing your system, and researching best practices and recommendations that directly affect domain and IP reputation, to avoid getting blacklisted.

Shameless plug: A while ago I decided to try build a home made SMPT Mail submission component for better understating what's going on under the hoods (and for "fun"), it was really though, and once I was able to send a DKIM verifyed e-mail to GMAIL servers I called it a day and moved on [1]

[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-...

> Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements

...there's no guarantee anyone else will. Currently I am getting moaned at because the "Money Stuff" newsletter is not arriving - which appears to be because Bloomberg have flubbed their DKIM. What am I supposed to do about that, eh?

The other day I setup a postfix server in my VPS, which I intend to use with mailman3 to have some mailing lists.

It was a bit of a pain to set up, but nothing too difficult. The worst part was setting up DKIM and SPF.

The thing is, I constantly hear people saying that managing an email server is something extremely difficult and that requires constant attention.

Am I doing something foolish by attempting to do this by myself? Should I just pay for a big email provider? (They’re quite expensive for the resources my organization has)

I’ve tried to set everything up as securely as possible, but I’m not an expert in email either. I’m just afraid I might be creating big trouble for myself in the future.

I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing).

Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).

Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)

Long story short, it's a mess :)

On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.

I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.

Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!

> I setup an email forwarder to route all email sent to .ws to my regular email address. >Eagerly I typed ben@.ws into the "to" field of gmail and hit send. > The email never hit my inbox. It was lost forever in cyberspace.

I think this was just caused by Gmail now working when a message is sent and received at the same account. It just disappears. [0]

It’s really annoying, it’s not part of a spec, it’s just gmail.

I ran into this because I have some forwarders too and if I send an email from gmail that goes out, when my external mail server sends it back to gmail it never gets there. It’s not deleted, it’s not marked as spam, it just doesn’t exist and there’s no record.

I suspect if author had sent from another account it would work fine.

[0] https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-...

Can confirm. This bit me recently until I thought to use another account for testing.

Exchange also does this, if you are part of a group, send an email to that group, you will never get it. We ran into it when one of our systems were sending an alert for a failed action to a group, but it was sending it on behalf of the person that tried to do that action and eventually failed. Everyone in the group was getting the email, except the original person.

That’s not so bad, but it’s not as bad as gmail.

Exchange will return a message that comes back to the mailbox via a forward. Also, I think, Exchange is doing this because the list is on server and it’s part of Exchange’s deduping. If I send to the list and foo and foo is in the list, foo gets one email, not two.

For example, I have foo@gmail.com, foo@outlook.com, foo@prepend.com.

I set up foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@gmail.com.

If I send a message from bar@gmail.com to foo@prepend.com, it comes through as expected.

If I send the same message from foo@gmail.com, I never get it. Prepend.com’s mail server has a record of sending it to gmail.com, but my gmail account has no evidence of it anywhere.

If I change foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@outlook.com, I don’t have this problem.

Is this some sort of abuse protection, where people use gmail as free storage?

Gmail already is free storage, AFAIK it shares you data quota with you Google drive account.

Most likely this is a 'mail-loop' prevention. If you setup two accounts that forward to each other, then emails will be stuck in an infinite loop. Inject a couple of multi-megabyte emails into that loop and you can take down the entire service. This is effectively a DOS attack.

It could also be an implementation detail.

Mail messages have a unique identifier. Gmail might just concatenate the mail identifier with your account identifier to use it as a primary key to store your email in the "mails" bigtable.

If you send email to yourself, when it comes to put the mail into the mails bigtable, the result will be "primary key already exists, cannot insert"

Maybe similar to this, but it works if my message stays in gmail when I send from my gmail straight to my gmail.

I don’t think so as email forwarding is pretty basic and it’s blocked even for tiny messages.

I suspect it was just some stupid developer pre-optimizing, thinking they were clever and not thinking through use cases. “Every email from me to me will skip external routing and just get flagged in storage; therefore, any email from and to me and not through that process must be fraud and we’ll just save the user from that and black hole it.”

IIRC, at one point in time, there was a way to evade spam filtering by setting the “from” and “to” to the recipient. Maybe this has something to do with that

Perhaps but this is where gmail is being stupid as they should be able to authenticate that the message actually was genuinely generated from a gmail account.

This is the most confuse part of gmail. I run an email forwarding service and I got this exact problem.

I ended up build a "Test button" where customer click, then we send an email from our own address and let them know why we did that and also link to your link.

Gmail is no doubt very useful but they have quite of few of quirks.

I'm confused, as I'm able to send and also forward messages from myself to myself just fine in gmail. How would I recreate this? Does it only come up for emails coming from outside of gmail?

You need a third party in between.

That’s what is crazy and took me a long time to debug. If I send from my gmail to myself it works fine.

But if I send to an external mail account that redirects back to me it’s gone.

You can test this with any mail server you run. You can theoretically run a mail server locally and test it if you have DNS resolution that gmail can see.

I use cpanel on one of those countless Linux shared hosts and they have a decent mail admin, I expect any other host will have the same or similar.

set up an account two@any.com.

Two@any.com forwards every incoming email to one@gmail.com

Send an email from one@gmail.com to two@any.com (which will automatically get forwarded back to one@gmail.com).

There will be no incoming email back in one@gmail.com. it will disappear at two@any.com

Should be in your sent folder right?

Yes, but it never gets to inbox. So it looks to the client exactly the same as a broken forward config, or some other bug where the recipient mail server doesn’t error back.

I don't know if it's related to this, but gmail deduplicates emails based on the Message-Id. This is entirely broken behaviour and causes trouble for us with mailing lists (eg. a mail is sent to the inbox and a mailing list, or sent to two mailing lists). Another in the list of reasons not to use gmail.

But if you send yourself an email, you will get it? How does deduplication work for that?

This is a “feature”. If an incoming message is “from” the recipient account, and somehow makes it past the spam filter, it puts it in sent.

In a perhaps apocryphal story, at least one person was fired when a malicious coworker used this to forge harassing emails from the victim.

When we can’t even discuss current tech events here on HN because HN filters out the characters needed, maybe it’s time for HN to rethink its emoji filtering policy.

I think you may expect way too much from such a simple website

Supporting Unicode characters is too much?

Supporting Unicode characters comes with a set of complications that you may want to address, as, for instance the infamous HTML-parsing with regex rant shows.

As soon as you start trying to address those, the simple problem suddenly grows quite a lot in scope.

Notice that HN already does support unicode: α β γ é ö 本

It actively filters out a small part of it, mostly emojis (which I think that it is a good thing to do).

Is HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql which is famously not full utf8mb4?

Hah, you think HN would use something mainstream like mysql?! I don't blame you.

But HN is 100% custom software, and built with it's own programming language as well, Arc (on Racket). AFAIK, HN still runs on files-as-a-db. You could check out the source here: http://arclanguage.org/install

Why "still" ? Is there anything wrong in using the filesystem as a database when it suits to do so ?

Nope, I'm not implying it's bad, just that they used to do that and they still do that to this day. I have nothing against storing data in files. In fact, I do that all the time myself too.

Don't databases also store data in files or am I missing the point?

Yes, ultimately they do (usually) and yes, you are missing the point.

"filesystem as a database" is not referring to database software that stores the data on disk but rather that the application is directly interacting with the filesystem. Imagine dumping a JSON document to disk, then reading it from disk, compared to storing a JSON string in a DB. Sure, they are both backed by the disk, but one is not "filesystem as a DB".

That release is quite outdated. They added a lot of stuff to filter spam, voting ring detectors, and other moderation stuff. Anyway, as far as I know, everything is still saved to the file system.

I find this trend of despising emojis quite pretentious and annoying. They are very useful in some circumstances. Acting like anyone using them is a dumb teenager, or they will automatically ruin a community, is completely absurd.

Its Gen X and you know it

They don’t know it, but the rest of us do

Its not a trend its out of touch old people that dont know they’re out of touch old people yet

What exactly are we afraid will happen if someone uses an emoji instead of typing :) ?

it's not really a big deal. Just like not allowing bold or colored text in the comments.

I am very thankful that it’s not supported

Lets just use punycode, it can be the new l33t xn--g28h

I think it would be acceptable to support emojis, but set the font to use the black/white ones rather than colour. That removes most of the distraction.

At present, this can be done by following any emoji character with the text variant selector, U+FE0E [1] (the example works perfectly on Firefox on KDE).

Later, it will be possible with CSS [2].

[1] https://mts.io/2015/04/21/unicode-symbol-render-text-emoji/

[2] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#font-variant-emoji-pro...

These still work:

⬛ ⌛ ⏳ ⌚ ⏰ ⏱ ⏲ ♟⌨♨♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ 🃏 🀄⬆ ↗ ↘ ⬇ ↙ ⬅ ↖ ↕ ↔ ↩ ↪ ⤴ ⤵ ▶ ⏩ ⏭ ⏯ ◀ ⏪ ⏮ ⏫ ⏬ ⏸ ⏹ ⏺ ⏏‼ ⁉〰⭕〽© ® ™ #⃣ ⃣ 0⃣ 1⃣ 2⃣ 3⃣ 4⃣ 5⃣ 6⃣ 7⃣ 8⃣ 9⃣ 🅰 🆎 🅱 🆑 🆒 🆓 ℹ 🆔 Ⓜ 🆕 🆖 🅾 🆗 🅿 🆘 🆙 🆚 🈁 🈂 🈷 🈶 🈯 🉐 🈹 🈚 🈲 🉑 🈸 🈴 🈳 ㊗㊙ 🈺 🈵 ⬛ ⬜ ◼ ◻ ◾ ◽ ▪ ▫ # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The unfiltered ones include, incredibly, the private use area of Unicode. You know, the code points that might show up as any symbol at all depending of the font?

About a year ago, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741817) someone here used what they thought was the Apple logo symbol, but some fonts (which follow the ConScript (unofficial) Unicode Registry for private use characters) might show a KLINGON MUMMIFICATION GLYPH instead!

Why stop at emojis? Why use the aubergine emoji when you can instead use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs[1]? There is even an anti-aubergine [2]!

In my opinion there is an untapped marked here. And it also is a "full circle" moment - i bet in the next millennium emojis will also be counted as hieroglyphs.

1: https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/

2: https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/

Heavy use of emoji is a great way to make me stop reading. I don't parse images super well - icon buttons in applications slow me down a lot, too.

Mentally trying to reconstruct meaning from icons might be a fun recreation, but it is a high-load, annoying waste of time for me when we just need to convey some info. Use your words, or I'm likely to check out at some point.

Try explaining how to type “Bob@naughty-croquet-hieroglyph.kz” in mixed company.

I built a site for that: https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com

Uff, φ is all sold out :smh:

On my machine (Ubuntu, Chrome), every special character is literally just a rectangle. Makes the website look a bit less interesting that way ;) I am not techie enough to be able to fix the view at my end.

As a self-confessed "indie dev" and have perfected the art of giving away value for free so I love to see stories like this. In a short period of time you've tried out a "crazy" idea that might catch on and you've earned some money already. I hope you can get 10x that income before long.

With regards to VAT - when you sell to B2C customers in Europe (which I'm sure you do), you need to charge them VAT in the state they reside in. The easiest way to do this is with something like Paddle [0]. After that, probably registering in Ireland for VAT MOSS [1].

It alarms me how many people start taking payments from Stripe for their new platform without spending any time to get sales/VAT tax compliance in place.

Remember when this [2] blew up on the front page of Hacker News about GitHub Sponsors delivering a B2C service, without any VAT applied? That's the same reason that just taking payments with Stripe isn't enough.

[0] https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050

This is a great fun project but a risky business idea. Only 13 registrars allow emoji now and one could also say only 13 still allow them. It is well possible that they will stop supporting emoji, like other registrars did in the past.

How do I know? Many years ago happen to own the single unicode character domain name that was coincidentally very similar to the logo of my website. At some point the registrar informed me that my domain will not be allowed by the NICs rules anymore and they had to cancel it. Made me a bit sad, but it ever was only a novelty anyways.

That was freaking awesome.

Basically it's a long and technical shaggy dog story. He started with an insane premise (emoji domain name ?!), added enough detail (The night of 150 emojis) to strain even a willing suspension of disbelief yet still without breaking it, and then ended with an anti-climactical (because it is a shaggy dog story even if true) $1440/year ARR.

Bravo.

This address will not work for obvious historic reasons in Germany.

Yeah, that product is pretty much dead on arrival in Germany

Such emails would look _very_ sketchy to most Germans

As a native German I have to admit that the problem with .kz only occurred to me after you mentioned it. I'm not sure if I should feel good or bad about this.

For anyone outside the german-speaking countres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps -- In german: Konzentrationslager, abbreviated with KZ. Similarly, never use abbrevations like SS, NS, AH, HH, HJ in Germany. Also, some of these are forbidden on our license plates.

Are Buddhists and Hinduists allowed to use Swastika in Germany?

Yes

Yes they are. The Swastika is a religious symbol, the Hakenkreuz is not.

The German swastika is a mirror reflection of the religious icon, btw.

No, it isn't. Dharmaic traditions use both directions.

This is correct.

Btw, there are dozens of other occurances, not just one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

"In Chinese, Japanese, and Korean the swastika is also a homonym of the number 10,000,..."

Why is Konzentrationslager KZ rather than KL ?

Good question! German Wikipedia says because it's got a harsher sound to it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konzentrationslager#Nationalso...

For the same reason, I hope he doesn't support this emoji https://emojipedia.org/star-of-david/ - or else the service would attract customers he might not want to be associated with...

Take nazi's money and give them a broken email system in return? Sounds win-win to me.

Jews?

edit: nevermind, I get it now.

Eh, you don't want the service to attract Jews or what? Star of David is a symbol within the Jewish community. What you are referring to is probably the "Yellow badge" that was used by Nazis for identifying Jews. Two very different things.

Let's not make all Jewish symbols Nazi-related, we have enough of that already.

Also, some soldiers wore the Star of David as a symbol of defiance against antisemitism. So if you see someone wearing that symbol (or using a domain with that symbol), assume they are Jews/supportive of Jews, not that they are Nazis.

Associating the star of david with the .kz TLD (concentration camp) is not a good idea.

Unless you're a avid Jew living in Kazakhstan of course.

For us who don't have the historic context (nor understand the reference to past concentration camps), what do you mean it won't work?

KZ is the shorthand for Konzentrationslager, i.e. concentration camp.

Ok, and .kz is the ccTLD for Kazakhstan. You think people can't realize the difference?

There's a difference between "realising the difference" and "actively wanting it as my internet identity".

Yep. If you're a German living or working in Kazakhstan it's certainly fine to have a .kz email.

Using it as in a vanity domain like we do with .me or .io, on the other hand, will definitely look weird.

You think the average person would know what a ccTLD is or that kz refers to Kazakhstan?

I think the average internet user is familiar with country-specific TLDs.

I think the average Internet user is not familiar with country-specific TLDs except for their own country and a few others. Most people do not realise that .me, .tv, .cc, are country TLDs, they think they are country-independent TLDs similarly to .com, .net, .org, and in practice they may well be used more by organisations and people that have no relation to those countries than by those that do. In this case even users who are aware that they are strictly speaking country TLDs have reason to assume the same applies: .kz was not picked because of any relation between Mailoji and Kazakhstan. It was picked for technical reasons, but users would not know of those technical reasons, they would have no reason to think it was picked for anything other than .kz being seen as a good name.

I'm just giving the explanation of the historical context to GP, I'm neither German nor a lawmaker in Germany.

Germany is a bit over the top in this regard. When abbreviating a name to two letters (like as an avatar or as a short form for a newspaper author name) we usually specifically avoid KZ, HJ, NS, SA, SS. You also can't get those in a license plate.

There must be some demographic which cares. I've personally only seen people amused by it.

Could you please explain HJ, NS and SA?

HJ = Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth)

SA = Sturmabteilung (NSDAP paramilitary org)

NS = idk, probably NatSoc / National Socialist

If you asked 100 people in Germany(!) what "KZ" stands for the result would be something like 95 say "Konzentrationslager", 5 say "I don't know" and 0 "ISO code for Kazakhstan".

Indeed. But if you ask the whole world (as we're on the internet), 1% might recognize it as "Konzentrationslager", 2% might recognize it as Kazakhstan and the rest have no idea.

So for general internet usage, I think it's fine. We're not modelling the internet after German customs after all.

No we're modelling the internet after US customs, which is why boobs are banned from mainstream Internet services and have to hide in the porn.

I'm not sure we're better off.

Maybe if you frequent websites based in the US, yeah. Otherwise no, there is plenty of boobs all across the web and some sites don't hide porn as not everyone is as prude as the americans.

But there are other webs out there, speaking many different languages and carrying many different customs. The beauty is that if you don't like US customs, you can usually find communities that are far away from US culture.

I just tried to explain why the .kz email-address would be problematic for germans. I didn't propose that this should be the general rule for all the internet. Personally I don't have a problem if someone from another country emails me from a .kz domain. But I wouldn't get one myself and if the person emailing me is german I would probably look twice to see what the reason behind that domain choice is.

I'm sure people can realize the difference, but I'd expect the thought process in Germany to go something like

1) hmm, they have .kz as the TLD

2) apparently thats kazakhstan? TIL

3) kinda weird that they, not being from kazakhstan, would choose to have that as their TLD. Maybe they're using it with another meaning in mind.

3.5) Let's give them the benefit of the doubt but remain wary of potential secret nazis, as one has to, here.

It's not whether they realize what it means as per the intent of the service provider, it's about what people think it means for other people. Since we're talking about an email service. I.e. I guess it's one thing to email someone in Germany from an <emoji>.kz email address and a completely different one to have customers (well, at least non-neonazi ones) signing up for such and address. Even if they do realize what kz stands for.

Ah, sorry, when I said "they" I meant a user of a .kz email address, not the service provider.

And .tv is Tuvalu, and .me is Montenegro, and .io is the British Indian Ocean Territory. But those domain names are popular largely because they have other meanings.

i.e. Nazi Death Camp

No, concentration camp. Extermination camps were a subset of concentration camps.

Doesn't mean that prisoners were expected to be well treated in a concentration camp (typically just well enough to be productive as a slave), but they were not directly sent to the gas chambers.

we don't make too much of a distinction in Germany or Austria in general usage of the word - while what you point out is technically correct, pretty much everybody here will understand "KZ" as "the whole of the nazi death machinery" and will definitely want to avoid to append it to their mail address in such a prominent way

Oh I'm all for simplifying the general language, the distinction doesn't really matter. However, I prefer to stick to the correct terms in writing :)

I think words here do matter. Concentration camp isn't taken as a euphemism, per se, but Nazi-specific jargon. This weakens its ability to invoke sympathy for other high-density, high-mortality regions

I really enjoyed the rabbit hole and sort of wished you made more money.

I think you need FOMO to get this to take off. My idea would be to join clubhouse app (I can invite you if you need) and tell people about your story as it’s entertaining, get some influencers there to have an emoji email on their bio as a contact - which is a perfect fit as most bios have a lot of emojis and clubhouse has no DM feature but people like to get I touch. The idea is a nice mix of utility and craze. Better than those NFTs in my opinion.

Plus I’m tempted to get one :) I’ll sleep on it though.

Good luck!

I bet since this hacker news post he's made much more money.

Why even bother with registering emoji domains?

Just allow people to register bob.<emoji>@mailoji.com.

TikTok users probably wouldn't care where the emoji was in the email address. Most non technical people don't even understand email addresses (you work here too? is the most common question I get when I tell people my email is <theircompanyname>@mydomain.com). Only internet nerds really care that the emoji is in the domain name.

I'm confused by the post about if I can buy g@ or only g@.kz - the post seems to suggest the former but I don't understand how that would work

oh HN doesn't support emojis - that is

    g@<unicorn-emoji>.kz

    g@<unicorn-emoji>

I think you need the .kz, if you don't, I can officially say that I am out of the tech game and need to go grow potatoes.

You need a TLD but IIRC, the second level is not required. So you could have something like `http://google`, which I think, Google actually had at some point in the past. Cannot however find anything related to this anymore.

The .ai TLD has an A record, so http://ai/ works.

Yes, this I understand. But not the other way around.

I wrote a post about that: https://www.simonjunod.ch/projets/webtld/

It's in French, but it's easy to understand the gist of it

I am also confused. I assume the email address would always be postfixed with .kz or the email would not arrive.

Yeah, the YouTube ad shows this (there's a quick screenshot of an email address with .kz after the emoji). But the ad also does the trick of eliminating the ccTLD after gmail and yahoo, it asks you "Still using an @gmail address?" ... well I use an @gmail.com address, but I see what you did there, you eliminated the .com so you could also hide the fact that your emoji address actually needs a .kz at the end.

g@<emoji>.kz

You need the TLD. He was just saying that he was looking for TLDs where it was currently possible to register a single emoji as the second-level domain. He found .kz and is now selling <whatever>@<emoji>.kz

I thought IETF had banned emoji domain names after the unicode snowman was registered? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572)

I did too... I’m assuming some registrars just haven’t properly dealt with this case.

ICANN banned emoji gTLDs. But there are ccTLD registries that don't fall under ICANN regulations.

Cool project! Like others noted mail can be such a pain though, you'll need a lot of customers to make it worth keeping it running after the first year.

Note: In the FAQ it says the price is $5/yr, but it seems to be $9.99 now.

I co-founded Nameplanet. Back in '99 we registered ca. 60,000 domains to provide vanity e-mail addresses (not at full price - we negotiated steep bulk discounts for several TLDs). In the end we moved on to create the dot-name TLD, and sold the e-mail service. It took the purchaser less than a year to recoup a multi-million purchase price by converting a tiny proportion of the userbase to paid accounts.

So, yes, you'll need a lot of users, but there's been a market for paid vanity e-mail addresses for a very long time, and this seems to be an untapped niche... I doubt he'll get rich off it, but there's a good chance he can grow it to a size that makes it very worthwhile.

Huh. Neat idea, but why does emoji needs to be a part of the domain? <rocket>@emojimail.com would work just fine? Plus, you can have mail aliases that way and combine multiple emoji too. <rocket><moon>@emojimail.com could be equivalent to rocket.moon@emojimail.com for compatibility purposes.

IIRC the email spec requires all characters to be ASCII.

Technically your email address isn't bob@[mailbox].kz, it's bob@xn--h78h.kz which your browser and possibly some mail clients will render as bob@[mailbox].kz. But xn--h78h@emojimail.com will always just display as xn--h78h@emojimail.com.

For the domain part, browsers and email providers have collectively agreed to render domains of the form xn-[stuff]-[stuff].[tld] according to the Punycode specification, but no such rendering exists for the username.

The ASCII only restriction feels very artificial. I wouldn't be surprised to find some work in progress to lift it.

Edit: yep, there is clearly work in that area and not even that recent. Of course support is spotty depending on actual software in use. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/760150/can-an-email-addr...

> Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.

Appreciate the honesty of a few weeks. The number of great looking projects on HN that mention 'build last weekend' are hard to belief.

I think i might have realised I've become old, when the very idea of an emoji domain causes me anger. sigh

Don't think it's about age. I'm also considered old (in the technology sphere at least) and I don't really enjoy the "emoji" humor either, but I don't get mad about seeing them. Let others have their fun, no need to get angry about things you cannot control.

I think I'm old in that I was thinking how would I write this emoji email address on paper. Also I can just imagine the joys of form validation when you add an emoji into the email address. On the other hand I doubt most email harvesting bots crawling the web would be configured to recognize an emoji email.

You shouldn't use any vanity email address as your only address, unless you want your online life lost to inbound GMail and outbound corporate filters. So, if there's a situation where you need to write it down, use the 'serious' address.

I'm not old and I hate it. I don't even know how to insert an emoji on a computer.

Yeah thats what i meant. I should see the fun as the primary part of this. I guess we're just one step away from meme email addresses.

But it's reasonable. Domains are already surprisingly confusing to people. Emoji in a domain piles on top of that when people have no clue that's possible. Plus it makes it more difficult to communicate the address verbally and it can be hard or even impossible to enter the address in some systems.

I think that I'm missing something.

General question:

can such emoji domain names be used as well for normal URLs for webbrowsers? (I guess "yes", but then why does the article focus that much only on email-addresses?)

If yes, does anybody have any example? (I'm testing a web-crawler => I would like to test it against such emoji-domains...)

Yes, but it will likely show up as punycode in the browser address bar, for example http://xn--938h.to

And sadly, you can't post emoji on hackernews comments :(

Thank you (http://xn--938h.to/ seems to perform a redirect? I see "meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://webcoliving.com/japanese.html'" /").

I was anyway hoping for that (I'm happy as it doesn't screw up the address bar with some kind of emoji that look like real chars).

Anyway, if somebody has examples of any (even slightly) (technically) hardcore domain names then please post => thaaank you :)

I have a domain that would be great for an e-mail forwarding service, but I have second throughts about starting it... Is there someone here with experience in this area? What should the OP be most scared of?

Abuse by spammers and criminals, DDoS and hacking attempts for starters.

Lots of spam complaints to handle manually. Also payments using stolen credit cards.

I run an email forwarding service call https://hanami.run

It's fun because you gotta learn alot about email. Especially when you play with DKIM, ARC chain you found yourself reading through RFC. Or when I discover weird issue like this: https://hanami.run/blog/posts/the-quirks-of-gmail-ui/

I think the OP mail one is for fun, people who registered an emoji email properly expect some fun aspect and OK with email being lost.

In practice, the most scared thing is having your IP on blacklist. Very quickly people will complain when they lost email or too many email goes to spam or just rejected completely.

Due to the nature of email forwarding, people usually own the domain, so they use random address for many random website(coupon, download free ebooks, shitty newsletter...) so it attract a large amount of spammer I have to constantly deal with now. When gmail return a 550 in their SMTP server(550 mean they block/rate limiting), I got a bit worry at first but I learnt to live with it nowsaday

Why so fixating on buying google.<tld>, netflix.<tld>, facebook.<tld> etc? The fact that one of those might be available does not make them valuable at all.

You can resell it to another speculator. Which I don't like, but isn't so different from a cryptocurrency that is never actually used for trade.

Cool, but I also wish this wouldn't exist.

"I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need."

Kudos to the author for such a fun project

Ironically, you cannot use emojis for the username (e.g. :crab:@:crab: )

I found this strange too. I wonder if there is some other technical reason or just somehow didn't think of this in the validation?

Fun idea! But It’s too bad that Kazakhstan’s decision to MITM all HTTPS traffic makes this a nonstarter for actual use

https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-i...

That seems completely unrelated to an email service, especially if most of its users are outside of Kazakhstan.

.kz registrants, like many ccTLDs, are required to host core services within the borders of Kazakhstan.

They don't MITM anything. There were a few ridiculously incompetent failed attempts. There will undoubtedly be more, but HTTPS works fine at the moment.

Just wanted to clarify this.

With the state of unicode support in the legacy systems that make up of our e-mail infrastructure, I doubt any emoji domain will be ready for any actual use, where you rely on e-mails being actually delivered to you.

I like this idea so much. I woke up this morning and think how can I get an emoji email. I don't want to buy country level tld and ICANN ban emoji domain.

Then I realize I can have emoji in email itself. So I quickly add emoji support to my email forwarding service: https://hanami.run

So now anyone can email me at @hanami.run . Note that many mail client may say email is invalid but please send anyway. My mail server supports emoji.

So anyone own an domain here, if you like Emoji email, signed up for https://hanami.com and add your domain in there and configure alias.

Try email me at `flower-emoji-hacker-doesn't-support-emoji@hanami.run`

Check our docs https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email

Long live emoji.

Just be careful with ccTLDs. Read more about the .IO debacle a few years back: https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...

Also recently, Notion had issues with their .SO TLD More info here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-sche...

> but some speculated that it may have to do with Notion’s web address: notion.so. The “so” suffix is the domain for the country of Somalia, and a deleted tweet from Notion asked if anyone knew people in Somalia.

A decade ago, Artsy had to move away from art.sy when Syria was sanctioned by the US.

The .ly’s and Libya were around that time too, I’m not sure if any of them were affected though.

I'm kinda disappointed that I can't register an emoji handle. No diamond at hands dot kz for me, I suppose.

I'd be more inclined to use it if he doubled up on the domains, for example also providing "clownemoji.kz" as well as (actual clown emoji).kz (so if I were to tell someone my email is "mfkp at clown emoji dot kz", they could either use the clown emoji, or spell it out.

I like the idea of having an email dedicated to joke and not serious stuff so I rushed to register one.

Kind of disappointed that I cannot send an email now, it takes away a lot of fun until I can especially since I've learned about this after paying :/

Missed opportunity here is to have made this free with a "powered by emojimail" link. Give people 1 month free for every friend they refer and after 3 months charge them for the year.

> Mailoji was not a proper business yet, so there was no way I could publish my ad.

I always have shelf businesses registered and available for this.

Its an art and almost passtime for me to sit down with bankers and open accounts for these things soon after registration and give the bare minimum information

“It’s a tech company”

“no, there isn’t a website its 2021 it just uses telegram and wechat to get customers”

(remember: the bank doesn't actually care about their anti-money laundering statutes either, they care about you giving them a reason to care, which is very different.)

I am old enough to remember what Panic claimed to be the first ever emoji domain in 2011 [0]. But a quick look at the relevant wikipedia entry sets the record straight [1].

[0]: https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

Just wanted to say I enjoyed that story - whimsical little tech project, written up in an entertaining and informative manner.

Not that I dislike more serious stories, but nice to have a mix.

OK, so somebody sends an email to one of those cute emoji addresses he has the service implemented for. Now the recipient hits reply - where does it go? From article I understood he did some forward service in order to avoid direct emoji domain blocking. So the recipient will hit reply and at the "Send to" field will be the email address of the normal domain, not the emoji one. How do you overcome this?

I've purchased an email to try it (not for serious stuff of course).

So for now you cannot send an email, only receive one.

When someone sends an email to your emoji account then it s forwarded to an actual email address of your choice. The mail will have the following signature at the end :

Sent via Mailoji. Don't reply to this email. Reply to the sender email address below

From Sender Name: sender@email.com to your Mailoji you@emoji.kz

---------

My God! I've been waiting for this since the day the architects told me "only ASCII characters are allowed in the email database field"

And now, I own yet another domain name. At least this one is so that my kid can have a very unique email address. That’s some high quality tween cred.

Neat. Suggestion: it would be useful to have a text search so I can see if you have a particular emoji without having to squint at the whole list.

This seems ripe for phishing, similar to @аррӏе.com (which isn't @apple.com -- go ahead and check) and someone actually did this once. [0] There are lots of emojis that are hard to tell apart from each other.

[0] https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/

> and yes, most form validations hate them.

Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously resistant to following the specifications.

I used to have an email address at university along the line of "f.d'a@university.edu". I couldn't make use of it, because no-one believed it was a valid address even though it is allowed by the goddam RFC. turns out you could put a lot of funky stuff in the local part of an email, spaces ? yep. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5

always relevant: "So you think you can validate email addresses": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxX81WmXjPg

Which is also why proposals to put email certs (S/MIME, OpenPGP) in the DNS led to hashing the local part, as DNS only allows ASCII and is case insensitive.

Pretty stupid of your university to give you this address. Sure it's technically valid, but they know perfectly well it will be refused almost everywhere, and even when not explicitly refused, it will cause bugs. Being technically correct is useless if you're the only one doing it.

Yes, it was I guess that was a bug I'm the student name to email generator. They quickly provided me a convenient alias but I was still able to receive mail at the address with the apostrophe, and it was cool. Having an apostrophe in my name still triggers a surprising numbers of bugs to this day...

This is awesome, but I can't imagine how much trouble you'd run into with emoji's being different on different devices, plenty of input methods / printers without support let alone writing your email down on a printed form. (Technically you can write the full encoded form and that will work but you'll have to memorise it.)

This guy seems crazy about registering weird domain names. netflix.soy, google(.hebrew).. good to see him making his money back and kudos for doing the jokes so thouroghly.

I too have such crazy stupid ideas all the time, but it's one thing to think about it and another to actually finish it and start marketing it with videos on producthunt and tiktok.

ICANN SSAC Advisory on the Use of Emoji in Domain Names

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf

A good document outlining many of the issues with using Emoji in domain names.

Just got http://xn--f18h.fm (rolled up newspaper) for https://newsasfacts.com. I actually think emoji urls pique people's interest more than traditional urls.

For anyone who is going down the impulse-buying of many domains (me!) and then finding yourself having too many unused domains, I created a little tool to make use of those unused domains (and maybe even monetize them)

https://www.newsy.co

Borat would say "very nice"

This was such a fun read. It inspired me to buy http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/

Edit 1: TIL Hacker News doesn't support emoji. lol

Edit 2: Yeah, I know; that's a cow, not a bull. Don't yuck my yum!

I’m surprised it doesn’t support emoji in the name field. No <emoji>@<emoji>.kz

When email addresses were standardized, unicode wasn't around.

For domains and hostnames we have punycode which maps unicode characters onto the ASCII charset, which is why it works.

This does not apply to the user portion of the email address.

Emoji as part of the display name should work, i.e. "Emoji" <user@emoji.kz>

RFC 6531 adds support for internationalized local-parts. Support in actual software may be lacking though.

I sometimes run into sites that won't even allow a + in the name part of an email address.

And yes, I use gmail and the + functionality extensively.

In the early days I used "/" in local parts, which is syntactically valid. That turned out to be a bad idea, as some mail software was mapping local-parts to file names...

Read the full article and watched your amazing trailer :) but loved the last line and fully agreed:

"But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun."

Right on man !!! Applause.

Added to personal wish list when I'm not sinking all my money in domain names & startup :).

When I see something like that, I feel genuinely ashamed I didn't do it myself yet. This is so stupid and impractical (seriously, imagine having an email address no email form validator even accepts), that it must be successful.

So, congrats, OP.

Please note that all kz domains must be served by servers located inside Kazakhstan.

Great job. Consider offering a more expensive option like $50 free forever. Also $10/year feels cheap for such a fun project.... try a random number like $16, I’m sure you’d have similar conversion. Kudos

I started registering some emoji domains on Ethereum Name Service, not to be a total squatter I’m building static sites and deploying them on IPFS...it’s fun but expensive so hopefully NFT dWeb/web3 domains turn out to have cryptoart value. The use case mostly seems to be a novelty wallet address but I’m going full blown GeoCities with building decentralized websites. I even built a NFT search engine deployed on IPFS at geocities.eth

The emoji domains are cool in theory but there are issues to say the least. Many services asking for your domain name don’t recognize the emoji character (google programmable search engine, fleek, github, etc...). I did manage to “hack” the system a little and register a single character emoji domain ( .eth) because it renders as 3 characters.

The real scoop is Netflix.soy. Excellent.

https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy

This is hilarious. I just tested it as a subdomain. O365 flatout won't let me send to emoji addresses, at least through the regular browser UI. Gmail is happy to oblige though

This promotional video is epic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c

This is delightful, enjoy your massive headache running this thing

"The next step was to convince someone else to buy an emoji email address. TikTok seemed like a good place to start given its demographic" that's accurate haha

This is so cool, wish I were as good an engineer as you! I am sadly trapped in my backend big tech world and haven't spent time nor effort to dig myself out of that hole

Emoji domains are a lot of fun for sure.

Shameless plug: A few years ago I discovered them for the first time and made https://.to which listed all available single-emoji domains for the .to extension.

Within a few days hundreds of emoji domains were registered and very few were left. I think I netted the registrar 10,000s of $$$ in days. (I got a nice commission myself as well of course).

Edit: okay so HN doesn't like emoji domains – here's a blog post that goes into more detail with the actual URL: https://marc.io/emoji-domains

I bought <beer>@<computer>.kz but it doesn't work, the forwarder doesn't have SMTPUTF8 support sadly.

The QA engineer in my couldn't not try that one :)

Registered an e-mail address. I’ll probably only use it to mildly impress some people and it’s entirely possible it will stop working within the year.

Then again, it’s $9.99...

> It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up.

And this is why they are "all taken" on all other domains...

TLD .cf supports emoji and can be bought for free (up to 12 months). Now good luck finding a reseller that processes the purchase of an emoji domain name.....

I just bought (not with the free deal) a one-letter emoji .cf domain name. €9 at Freenom.com.

(It would probably have been better to use the free deal for a few months first.)

Emojis in subject lines can sometimes cause issues with ticketing systems, so I can only imagine how ticketing systems will like emojis as domains.

It has emoji domains, but disallows emoji accounts. Weird. I cannot have @.kz.

This is probably disrupted by HN. I mean I cannot have [thumbsup]@[thumbsup].kz.

Ben Stokes is also a very popular English cricketer.

I went to [lightbulb-emoji].kz and it transformed to http://xn--ds8h.kz

That is to prevent phishing with latin characters that look identical to normal ones.

That's punycode. Your browser is configured to display everything as ascii, using the punycode "transcoding". It's a good practice, see the binance hack that used binance.com with a tiny diacritic on one of the letters, that lead to a huge phishing attack.

> 80 emojis in, forking over money for a goat emoji domain name, you seriously start to question what you're doing.

Why can't you pick an emoji as username

The local part (i.e. "username") of an email is restricted to a limited set of valid characters.

https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html

This is awesome. But why make the recipient copy and paste the reply address? Can't you use the Reply-To header?

What is the rfc regarding usernames? Can emojis only work on the main domain? Can't we have [emoji]@[emoji].kx?

Can you have emoji@emoji.emoji email address?

So your email address would just be 5 "characters" including the @ and the dot

How does this work? Is it converted to some super ugly punycode, or do domains actually support full Unicode?

> complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji"

Almost spit out my coffee laughing at this

Emojis are "fun" in the same way hallmark melody greeting cards are "fun"

Great read and really liked his style of writing. This line made me giggle

Very nice.

Really fun idea and interesting to see how it grew and grew :)

Thanks for the reminder, I now own a double rainbow domain.

It’s a bummer the username can’t be an emoji, too. <money bag>@<rainbow><rainbow>.kz would be an awesome email address.

I will never use this, but I'm delighted it exsits.

You're a monster. This was a delightful read.

I love how it says everywhere to "buy" a TLD when it's really renting or leasing. It's not like it's a one time payment and then you own it.

Is this wrong? Am I misunderstanding anything? I'm genuinely curious.

the author may like to know Cyrillic doesn't automatically mean Russian

The website is in Russian though. The author probably knew that because he had to use some online translation tool to go through the purchase process.

Fun fact: the Kazakh government decided to replace Cyrillic with Latin for the Kazakh language. Apparently the process is supposed to end in 2025, but I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment.

ah wow neat

>I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment

Not much. Most publications and websites are still using the old alphabet, including the most important government portal which is used by pretty much everybody: https://egov.kz/cms/kk

I rarely see it on anything more substantial than ad banners and propaganda posters (like "don't litter" and "vote for our beloved leader").

Borat would be proud of you.

> TLDR; (…) made $1000 in a week

> (…)

> I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.

> (…)

> Even though I still haven't made the money back on all the emoji domains I bought

So it took longer than a week and you haven’t made any money. If you’re having fun and things are going well by your metrics, why exaggerate (especially) in the TLDR?

It brought me back to a recent Indie Hackers post[1]:

> It took me a while to both learn how this stuff works and also that those posts can exaggerate or hide information to better sensationalize the post.

[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did...

untypeable emails

I'm still don't know why emoji's are a thing.

People like to communicate their emotions through cute pictograms, it's not difficult to understand.

I find it fascinating that some people fail to understand that. It's so obvious. Emojis are hugely useful to convey intent and emotion. But they're relatively new, so I suppose they're automatically stupid, get off my lawn etc etc

Emotional context is easily lost over text. Adding an emoji at the end helps makes it more explicit when you're employing irony, sarcasm, or when expressing a genuine emotion like sadness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454

This is not that

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