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Gail.com

gail.com

525 pointsisomorph107 comments

There's a great little Easter Egg if you view source:

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> I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards

Ironically, this easter egg makes her exciting.

Yeah and not unexciting at all, that's a beautiful cat.

If the box were closed it could be Schrödinger's cat!

I love the domain squatting complaint--

> vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;

Can the respondent really be so ignorant of overseas manufacturers of extruded architectural ceramics, which were available in the respondent's home country as recently as 1990?

Recent relevant XKCD. Average Familiarity.

https://m.xkcd.com/2501/

I felt this when I, an avid chess player, surveyed friends and fewer than half knew who Bobby Fischer was.

I took two earth sciences classes and even I can’t name any. The best I can do is that silicate is SiO4. I think. And it’s this tetrahedron thing that makes for really tough minerals like quartz. Maybe.

Our company is the owner of kamer.nl (kamer=room/chamber) and our government in the Netherlands has a first and second chamber (eerstekamer and tweedekamer) as a parallel to Congress/House of Commons.

We're getting a lot of emails (due to a catch-all) because politicians type foo@tweede.kamer.nl, foo@eerste.kamer.nl or just plain foo@kamer.nl instead the correct foo@tweedekamer.nl or foo@eerstekamer.nl.

It does sometimes contain some privacy-sensitive information and we always reply and point them to the mistake. We do this because hopefully they learn (most do...) and they can get the information to the right person.

out of curiosity, why do you maintain a catch all? would it not be easier (and less of a privacy issue) to just reject them outright?

It has a business reason: we let customers email each other on an anonymized email address ($hash@kamer.nl) to keep their info private. I know the structure of the hash (length etc) but no clue how to filter on the mail-server side using this characteristic, that’s why a catch-all. We’re thinking of sunsetting the feature and that would mean that a catch-all won’t be necessary anymore :-)

As the owner of a domain that matches with an ISP in Washington state (except for a missing "M" in mine), I feel Gail's pain.

I send back a canned response to most people once, then blacklist/drop the incoming address.

The worst I had was when someone decided that I was the one doing the wrong thing and demanded that I forward the email to the correct person. I engaged them back and forth for a bit, then eventually found the contact details of the company, forwarding the email chain to them and pointing out their customer service person's stupidity.

I got a nice reply from the CEO thanking me and an apology email from the CS person.

  There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain, so it is extremely likely that your photos were rejected by my e-mail provider and tossed into the bit bucket.

Good to know their rejected emails are instantly uploaded to a hosted git server ;)

I've actually never heard bit bucket used like this before. Is that the origin of the name for bitbucket.com?

> I've actually never heard bit bucket used like this before. Is that the origin of the name for bitbucket.com?

Yes, it's ancient as far as computer jargon goes. The etymology is pretty grounded in the real world though! It's where chads that were discarded by card punching machines go.

Chad has a very different meaning to me. Good lord I've never felt more like a baby millennial

Fascinating info, thanks :)

Haha, my brain seems to still bit-flip on the term "chad" nowadays. Before the current usage, the biggest thing was the "hanging chad" in Florida in a US presidential election.

As a mid-aged Gen-X, 'Chad' when I was growing up was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here#:~:text=Chad

Then I did Comp. Sci. at school, and I learned that the whole Chads from punched cards was a thing, so my association with the word changed.

re: Bit Bucket. Again due to my age I guess, it was always a term for where thrown-away data went, along with 'Into the Ether' for lost network packets.

I love learning the etymology of jargon. For example, loops were once physically looped paper.

It’s an old term for /dev/null et al. (The New Hacker’s Dictionary has a comic featuring a literal one in the background of the water-powered computer: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.html)

I assume this is where the company got their name from; I remember thinking when I encountered them that it was a bit strange to name your company after something that implied unreliability and lost data.

TNHD is how shub-Internet.ims.disa.mil was created, and actually did live in the basement of the Pentagon.

Well, the Mezzanine level, actually. Room MF-648 or something like that, IIRC.

It wasn’t until 1995 that I registered shub-internet.org and some other THND-related .org domains.

Uh oh. This makes me think my younger colleagues don't know what I'm talking about at least half the time, but never ask...

It never even registered with me until you asked, but that makes bitbucket the worst possible name, maybe next to "trashfire.com", for a service that is supposed to store data.

TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_bucket

So as a metaphor I guess it's roughly equivalent to /dev/null or the recycling bin? Yeah, probably not the best name for a mission-critical immutable data store, unless it was meant to be ironic.

Well, it is Atlassian, so that kind of works.

More like kind of bugs out.

Its not like "git" or "mercurial" are all that inviting either.

Hahaha trashfire.com is an excellent name for a saas, love it.

Of course (oh, how it makes me feel old too) that fantastic name is already registered and parked, and available for resale at the nice, nice price of $4,395 from HugeDomains. :(

I think there is a German ISP called SNAFU, so there's that.

Anyway, I call dibs on trainwreck.io!

Yes! It's the bucket you toss the useless bits of chad! Think of teletypes and what to do with the chads of paper.

I don't imagine you ever imagined the cross-polination of hanging-chads with bitbucket.com!

There's an updated version for the modern app developer, https://devnull-as-a-service.com/

Past threads:

Gail.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854961 - Dec 2019 (9 comments)

Gail, not Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 - March 2017 (154 comments)

Good that they still have it. In France, a seamstress named Milka infamously lost her shop's milka.fr domain to a food giant owning the brand.

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milka_contre_Kraft_Foods

Meanwhile Mr. Nissan's legacy(he passed away last year) lives on:

https://nissan.com/

> Another interesting gail.com factoid: my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain.

Would be interesting to set up mail servers on "mistyped" domain names. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get sensitive information that would be useful for spear phishing.

There's a similar attack involving registering domains that are a bit flip off from a well-known domain.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/windows-com-bitsquat...

> I wouldn't be surprised if you could get sensitive information that would be useful for spear phishing.

I know a bunch of people with common names who frequently get misdirected gmails that include car rentals, doctor appointments, hotel bookings, etc. I've only had a few (<10), alas, and they were mostly about buying art.

(Although who knows? Maybe those "misdirected" emails are themselves a sophisticated attack to get people to click on the "unsubscribe" or "this is not me" links...)

I have a relatively common name in South America, and get all kinds of stuff. Travel itineraries, legal documents, info about kids soccer matches, all sorts of stuff. I used to try to help people but it’s honestly pretty annoying, so I just delete it now.

Yeah, I have a firstname.lastname@gmail address and I have received mortgage documents for two different people in two different countries.

I created a little python script that took a list of domains and created various misspellings of those domains, checked for MX records set for them.

I ran this on a list of "sensitive domains" (law authorities, government agencies etc). For example there were 2-3 domains for misspellings of "polisen.se" (the Swedish police) that had MX records set and were presumably receiving some emails they shouldn't.

Also known as typosquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting

An interesting fact: A factoid is not "a small piece of fact", it is infact:

an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.

An interesting factoid: though that was the original (and etymologically correct) meaning of the word "factoid," the meaning has since shifted. The word can now also mean "a briefly stated and usually trivial fact."

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid

Awesome site, the owner(s) seem like good people.

  Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
  A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below. If you believe in a free Internet, please consider clicking on the link and donating to the EFF.

Yep, classy dame, Gail.

A four letter .com domain must be worth a lot of money. I'd want to cash in.

Last I heard they easily fetch 7 figures even for garbled acronyms. gail.com is a word, a name, a typo of gmail... in other words it's worth a fortune

Yes, but a homophone of "gale", so some people confuse it. So probably half a figure less.

Nope, only a couple hundred bucks: https://shortnames.com/llll . Two-letter .coms are often sold in the high 6 and low 7 figures.

I just looked at a few domains on that list and they were delisted within minutes.

I finally got it to work and got a 4 letter domain, wsvy.com, for only $250. Thanks for the suggestion!

Given that this [0] is very likely Gail’s husband (the guy who purchased the domain as a birthday gift for her in 1996), I don’t think they need the money.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkevinwatson

(I found this by Googling “Kevin Watson La Cañada”, the defendant mentioned in the domain takeover lawsuit.)

Today I learned SpaceX is short for “Space Exploration Technologies”.

I made it to 11:50pm today before I felt inadequate.

Technical co-founder of DigitalOcean owns wit.com (and he loves telling people) - he told me he's had offers well into 7 figures for it. 10000% sure he'll never sell it, ever, he loves it. :)

I own several 3 & 4 character .com/net domains and have never had any requests to purchase them. They are all too obscure to be useful I guess.

This one would only be super valuable to Google (Catch gmail.com typos) or if someone wanted to launch a product called Gail (in my opinion).

Paying a million or more for a domain to consolidate branding is common for example pop.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223515 and I know Puppet Labs paid a pretty penny for Puppet.com when it became available, and they were able to rebrand once they had that domain.

Not only GMail, many of those hits might be people trying to reach Gas Authority of India : GAIL website .

It is www.gailonline.com

I own awio.com and nobody's ever offered to buy it from me. It's not for sale, but 4-letter domains that aren't real words must not be so valuable.

Tree fiddy

$3.51 final offer

I'll give you $5 for it.

aws.io is what you should’ve bought instead ;)

I have one. I also have a /24 IPv4 address block. Back in the old days, you often registered both at the same. They were also free.

The floor for random four letter .coms is only around $100 currently. Gail.com would go for 1,000-10,000x that though.

zoom.com sold for $2,000,000 on 12/14/2018

https://shortnames.com/llll/sales#0U

the shop that services my porsche owns epe.com. they have had several offers for $1M plus, but they will not sell it.

i only take my vehicle there because they own a 3-letter domain! ;)

Not only GMail, many of those hits might be people trying to reach Gas Authority of India : GAIL website .

It is www.gailonline.com

Also very similar to gaiaonline.com

> Q: Interested in selling gail.com? > A: Sorry, no.

I wonder if that answer would stand if Google offered her $3M USD so they could recover some of their lost traffic.

Someone who was registering domains in 1998 might be in a position now where $3 million dollars is inconsequential.

> Someone who was registering domains in 1998 might be in a position now where $3 million dollars is inconsequential.

looks at bank account

IF ONLY. Although I did get one offer for a domain, it was extremely low and they seemed like shady people.

I actually did register a domain in 1998. Playstationcheatcodes.com. I was 12 and had no idea how to make a website, and my stepdad had some words when he got the bill. Good times!

this domain is probably worth more than all the money I've ever made, not selling it is quite impressive

why sell. just sit on it and watch value go up and up

In the world of hashtags and search, are domain-name prices still increasing? Seems like they should have peaked.

Internet is only going to get more important. There’s no way domains are going to get cheaper. Any short domain will be worth millions given a long enough timeline.

why not sell the domain during your lifetime and enjoy the fortune - before dying?

In this case, because it was a gift from her husband.

You might have replied to the wrong comment, this thread is about the value of domains, not OP’s link. I agree keeping the domain is silly, but perhaps the guy is rich enough to not care.

<font> elements! It really is from 1996. I haven't seen code that outdated since the frontend of Hacker News.

I was just 1 year old in 1996. For my generation it’s sucky that someone can squat on a domain by virtue of being first.

less than a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27957877

I didn't think typosquatting actually worked. I wonder if there's a general way to figure out the most common misspellings of a given domain name...

Oh god, this sounds like it could be an interview question

I could see this being a leetcode medium/hard level backtracking question.

Put each misspelling on top of a round hole and see if it falls in.

Easier to just do bitsquatting: register all the domains that are one cosmic ray induced bit flip away from a common domain name, e.g. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hijacking-tra...

We did this for a customer and to see what leaks. It’s very surprising and sometimes very bad from a security perspective on popular and high traffic domains of service providers.

I remember when this hit HN a few months(?) back, for me it was the first time learning about this and I assumed this might be an obscure thing.

I ran the python script against my (very large) employer's domain name and was pleasantly surprised to see we owned all the bitsquatted versions already (there were maybe 10?)

it worked for that person because gmail.com is a hugely popular domain and they had gail.com before gmail was even created. nowadays much more competitive

I recall reading a story about someone who became legendary among squatters because he somehow managed to negotiate the rights to commercialize Colombia's TLD (.co), meaning he positioned himself to take a cut of every .com -> .co typosquat ever.

Here's the guy himself talking about it in a NYT article[0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/jobs/from-dot-com-to-dot-...

The one that scares me is gamil.com. I have made that typo numerous types, and the domain is owned by some guy in Florida who runs a small business.

As boomers who also worked in IT they have a house and all the money they need. Might as well have a little gimmick hobby on the side!

I have read the FAQ on the page. What a wonderful, pleasant person.

Reading the legal arguments of the Gail ceramic company makes me never want to do business with that horrible company.

>> "Respondent’s domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith. The domain name <gail.com> is nearly identical to the trademarks owned by the Complainant and was registered to prevent the Complainant from reflecting the trademark GAIL in a corresponding domain name. Furthermore, because the Respondent registered the domain name exactly when the Complainant increased its sales of GAIL products to the United States, this should be identified as an abusive practice"

Ugh. Seriously? Who pays a lawyer to write horrible stuff like this. It is so pathetic and there was no evidence any of it is true. At least the respondent won the case.

If you think that's bad you should see the extended legal battle a guy with the family name Nissan had to engage in when he was sued by the car company.

And the theft of France.com. This kind of behaviour is all too common.

https://domainnamewire.com/2021/03/25/court-rules-france-can...

Lego is pretty bad too.

> faq at gail period com

There's a typo at the bottom of the page, I think you mean faq at gMail period com.

I can’t tell if you didn’t notice the site you were on, or if I missed your joke.

At this point I'm sure it's a joke, but I still don't get it.

Makes you wonder how many e-mails aimed at gail.com accidentally land at gmail.com.

If you read the page it would tell you, no need to wonder.

If you read the comment you'd realize your mistake, no need to be snarky.

Especially given that at least some autocorrect systems helpfully suggest correcting to "gmail" when you write something similar-looking in the domain part of an address.

It's funny how some of those systems try to correct anything that doesn't look like one of the big email providers. I use a custom domain for mail, and I can be 100% sure that it doesn't even look remotely like any well-known mail provider's domain, yet a very well-known website I tried to sign up for warned me that there is most likely a typo in my email address.

Better answer for the question "I tried to send some photos to my girlfriend and typed gail.com instead of gmail.com in the address field. The photos were of a very personal nature. Can you please delete them?" would be: "Don't worry! Your photos of a very personal nature are safely stored at NSA and will be scanned for all possible (ab)uses, many times, even in the future. In case of artificial intelligence false positives, they will also be manually scanned and reviewed - many times, even in the future. So please send the removal request to the NSA."

ahh typo-squatting... it creates so many interesting stories.. I have a few products related to domain names [1][2] and in the past I knew some users who owned "none.com.au" (which is a typo for nine.com.au - one of Australia's TV channels) and "gail.com.au" (similar to gail, but with .com.au) - which all attracted pretty decent traffic without any effort. They had some pages with Google AdSense going.

I also knew this user, who had the same domain name as one of the more popular YouTube video downloading tool, but with ".net". He put up an adsense that attracted 8k clicks per day.

Internet is filled with these fascinating stories.

[1] https://www.newsy.co [2] https://www.domainy.io

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