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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.

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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.

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