[HN Gopher] I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email
       service
        
       Author : tinyprojects
       Score  : 1200 points
       Date   : 2021-03-11 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tinyprojects.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tinyprojects.dev)
        
       | ada1981 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | opinologo wrote:
       | "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
        
       | rwmj wrote:
       | I thought IETF had banned emoji domain names after the unicode
       | snowman was registered?
       | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572)
        
         | alexmingoia wrote:
         | I did too... I'm assuming some registrars just haven't properly
         | dealt with this case.
        
           | setBoolean wrote:
           | ICANN banned emoji gTLDs. But there are ccTLD registries that
           | don't fall under ICANN regulations.
        
       | ylere wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | vidarh wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | Aldipower wrote:
       | This address will not work for obvious historic reasons in
       | Germany.
        
         | yoodenvranx wrote:
         | Yeah, that product is pretty much dead on arrival in Germany
         | 
         | Such emails would look _very_ sketchy to most Germans
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | sieste wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | carstenhag wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | umanwizard wrote:
           | Why is Konzentrationslager KZ rather than KL ?
        
             | Cockbrand wrote:
             | Good question! German Wikipedia says because it's got a
             | harsher sound to it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konzentr
             | ationslager#Nationalso...
        
           | qwerty456127 wrote:
           | Are Buddhists and Hinduists allowed to use Swastika in
           | Germany?
        
             | bsenftner wrote:
             | The German swastika is a mirror reflection of the religious
             | icon, btw.
        
               | SavantIdiot wrote:
               | 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,..."
        
               | qwerty456127 wrote:
               | No, it isn't. Dharmaic traditions use both directions.
        
               | dheera wrote:
               | This is correct.
        
             | joeberon wrote:
             | Yes
        
             | qayxc wrote:
             | Yes they are. The Swastika is a religious symbol, the
             | Hakenkreuz is not.
        
         | rob74 wrote:
         | 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...
        
           | thrwyoilarticle wrote:
           | Take nazi's money and give them a broken email system in
           | return? Sounds win-win to me.
        
           | 0-_-0 wrote:
           | Jews?
           | 
           | edit: nevermind, I get it now.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Tepix wrote:
             | Associating the star of david with the .kz TLD
             | (concentration camp) is not a good idea.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | Unless you're a avid Jew living in Kazakhstan of course.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | shakow wrote:
           | KZ is the shorthand for Konzentrationslager, i.e.
           | concentration camp.
        
             | capableweb wrote:
             | Ok, and .kz is the ccTLD for Kazakhstan. You think people
             | can't realize the difference?
        
               | ben0x539 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | atleta wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | shakow wrote:
               | I'm just giving the explanation of the historical context
               | to GP, I'm neither German nor a lawmaker in Germany.
        
               | wongarsu wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | NullPrefix wrote:
               | Could you please explain HJ, NS and SA?
        
               | wtf_is_up wrote:
               | HJ = Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth)
               | 
               | SA = Sturmabteilung (NSDAP paramilitary org)
               | 
               | NS = idk, probably NatSoc / National Socialist
        
               | Doctor_Fegg wrote:
               | There's a difference between "realising the difference"
               | and "actively wanting it as my internet identity".
        
               | ratww wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | growt wrote:
               | 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".
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | eloisant wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | growt wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | thomond wrote:
               | You think the average person would know what a ccTLD is
               | or that kz refers to Kazakhstan?
        
               | garbagetime wrote:
               | I think the average internet user is familiar with
               | country-specific TLDs.
        
               | hvdijk wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | folli wrote:
             | i.e. Nazi Death Camp
        
               | shakow wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | krsdcbl wrote:
               | 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
        
               | shakow wrote:
               | 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 :)
        
               | ludamad wrote:
               | 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
        
       | quickthrower2 wrote:
       | 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!
        
       | mbreese wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | kuu wrote:
       | Really fun idea and interesting to see how it grew and grew :)
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | tester34 wrote:
         | I think you may expect way too much from such a simple website
        
           | emodendroket wrote:
           | Supporting Unicode characters is too much?
        
             | scbrg wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | enriquto wrote:
               | Notice that HN already does support unicode: a b g e o
               | Ben
               | 
               | It actively filters out a small part of it, mostly emojis
               | (which I think that it is a good thing to do).
        
               | Biganon wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | vmception wrote:
               | 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
        
               | emodendroket wrote:
               | What exactly are we afraid will happen if someone uses an
               | emoji instead of typing :) ?
        
               | enriquto wrote:
               | it's not really a big deal. Just like not allowing bold
               | or colored text in the comments.
        
               | xPaw wrote:
               | Is HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql
               | which is famously not full utf8mb4?
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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
        
               | gus_massa wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | enriquto wrote:
               | Why "still" ? Is there anything wrong in using the
               | filesystem as a database when it suits to do so ?
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | KorfmannArno wrote:
               | Don't databases also store data in files or am I missing
               | the point?
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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".
        
           | monstersinF wrote:
           | I am very thankful that it's not supported
        
             | corobo wrote:
             | Lets just use punycode, it can be the new l33t xn--g28h
        
             | Symbiote wrote:
             | 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...
        
         | ada1981 wrote:
         | These still work:
         | 
         |  [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?]      / \  /  \ | - - -   > [?] [?]
         | [?] < [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?] [?]!! !?~[?](c) (r) (tm) # _
         | 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9         m                      (Zhu)  (Mi)
         | [?] [?] [?] [?] # #_ # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
        
           | teddyh wrote:
           | 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!
        
       | marban wrote:
       | Thanks for the reminder, I now own a double rainbow domain.
        
         | elliekelly wrote:
         | It's a bummer the username can't be an emoji, too. <money
         | bag>@<rainbow><rainbow>.kz would be an awesome email address.
        
       | tobib wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | tobib wrote:
         | Is this wrong? Am I misunderstanding anything? I'm genuinely
         | curious.
        
       | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | This is not _that_
        
       | Toutouxc wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | notsureaboutpg wrote:
         | On the mailoji website it says you cannot currently send emails
         | using your mailoji address. It's just for forwarding mail to
         | your main inbox at the moment
        
         | gnopgnip wrote:
         | The clever part about this is they don't deal with
         | deliverability at all. This is only for incoming email.
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | The emoji part is charming.
         | 
         | The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!
        
           | maybevain wrote:
           | 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
        
       | jefe_ wrote:
       | 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.'
        
         | devoutsalsa wrote:
         | >> 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.
        
         | kozak wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | TurkishPoptart wrote:
           | On my work computer on Win10 it just opens up the magnifier
           | :(
        
             | allannienhuis wrote:
             | it's <winkey> AND <periodkey>. I tried <winkey> AND
             | <pluskey> the first time too :)
        
           | fegu wrote:
           | Thanks, did not know this. In fact, learned both Win + plus
           | (and discovered Win + minus along the way) as well as Win +
           | dot :)
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | <-- Yes!
           | 
           | Edit: Alas, it does not work on HN. Pity.
        
             | MegaButts wrote:
             | Where does this work?
        
               | oauea wrote:
               | Literally everywhere. HN just strips out emojis from
               | posts, because they're obnoxious.
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | oauea wrote:
           | > 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.
        
           | akx wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Razengan wrote:
             | The iOS and I believe macOS emoji picker let's you use any
             | language to search for emojis. hato brings up hearts for
             | example.
        
               | codetrotter wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | garmaine wrote:
               | On my phone at least (latest iOS) it will search any
               | installed keyboard languages.
        
             | belval wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | Razengan wrote:
               | _eggplants in Spanish_
        
               | chordalkeyboard wrote:
               | _la berenjena_
        
             | Nition wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | ezekg wrote:
           | For other readers: emoji keyboard is ctrl + cmd + space on
           | macOS.
        
             | jfk13 wrote:
             | Not always; that's app-specific, not a system-wide setting.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | dhosek wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | GekkePrutser wrote:
               | It doesn't work in every app sadly. Qt based apps for
               | example
        
               | dhosek wrote:
               | Hmm, I guess I've never used any Qt-based apps.
        
               | GekkePrutser wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | jfk13 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | vulcan01 wrote:
               | Cmd-space launches Spotlight. Ctrl-space switches the
               | input layout. Ctrl-Cmd-Space launches the emoji viewer
               | (even in Firefox...)
        
               | jfk13 wrote:
               | 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.)
        
               | ezekg wrote:
               | 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).
        
               | jfk13 wrote:
               | What exactly works in Firefox -- is it Command-Control-
               | Space or just Command-Space?
        
               | dhosek wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | jfk13 wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | joshstrange wrote:
             | 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/
        
             | pilsetnieks wrote:
             | 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.)
        
           | scaladev wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | mxmilkb wrote:
             | https://github.com/Mange/rofi-emoji
        
               | codethief wrote:
               | And another character picker for Rofi:
               | 
               | https://github.com/fdw/rofimoji/
        
             | lights0123 wrote:
             | GNOME has Ctrl+period.
        
               | dorfsmay wrote:
               | It doesn't do anything for me. Can you point to a doc?
        
               | lbhdc wrote:
               | Does it? I am in stock gnome and this shortcut isn't
               | bound by default. What distro are you using?
        
               | dcminter wrote:
               | 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... :'(
        
               | lbhdc wrote:
               | Oh wow, you are totally right, that does work in GTK
               | apps. My daily drivers are about the same :(
        
               | lobstrosity420 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | thesuitonym wrote:
               | KDE has one, too. Not sure what the default was, I
               | remapped it to Super+Period
        
               | gerdesj wrote:
               | I use KDE and I've never tried it before. Win+. works!
        
             | gnull wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | boogies wrote:
               | 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>
               | : "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
        
               | tux3 wrote:
               | Oh, those are in Debian, as a matter of fact!
        
               | bmn__ wrote:
               | https://github.com/kragen/XCompose for those who prefer a
               | more methodical approach.
        
             | sphaerophoria wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | t0mas88 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | jraph wrote:
             | 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?
        
               | t0mas88 wrote:
               | 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?
        
           | username3 wrote:
           | Win+Period or Win+Semicolon
        
           | TeMPOraL wrote:
           | 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/d330edccf8ba9a2b13d01b
           | 4e7f1...
        
         | russfink wrote:
         | Brilliant!
        
         | dmingod666 wrote:
         | 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.."
        
           | danaliv wrote:
           | I like to think of Wikipedia as a site for people who like to
           | correct other people.
        
             | scrozier wrote:
             | Oh, that cuts to the quick.
        
             | giantrobot wrote:
             | "Well actually..." given form.
        
               | 29083011397778 wrote:
               | 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 :)
        
             | ddingus wrote:
             | This is brutal, and potent. Nicely done.
        
             | anderspitman wrote:
             | One of my favorite reddit shower thoughts:
             | 
             | "Wikipedia built the biggest modern information hub using
             | nothing but nerds' need to correct each other."
        
               | danaliv wrote:
               | It's really quite astonishing how powerful a force that
               | is, and how well Wikipedia channels it toward something
               | good!
        
         | gottavomment wrote:
         | This is art. I worked as a cashier for a couple years, and this
         | feels like a fever dream about those days.
        
           | ethbr0 wrote:
           | 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)
        
         | juliend2 wrote:
         | There should be a museum for those kinds of HN thread comments.
         | 
         | This kind of prose is truly hilarious.
         | 
         | Thank you.
        
         | vlunkr wrote:
         | Come to HN for the news, stay for the short fiction. Well done.
        
         | fennecfoxen wrote:
         | right, okay, robert@xn--ds8h.kz, got it. thanks, Punycode!
        
         | duiker101 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | thesuitonym wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | joshstrange wrote:
             | 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".
        
             | davchana wrote:
             | For me, they send emails at mydomain.com@gmail.com
        
               | thesuitonym wrote:
               | Ah jeez, maybe they do that to me, too, and I just don't
               | know it?
        
               | davchana wrote:
               | I know because I registered an actual
               | mydomain.com@gmail.com name too.
        
           | MrsPeaches wrote:
           | 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
        
             | swilliamsio wrote:
             | Please don't tell me there exists genuine attempts to
             | "cancel" the .io domain.
        
               | MrsPeaches wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | Miraste wrote:
               | > 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."
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | Are you cancelling free speech?
        
               | belval wrote:
               | Owning a .io domain is taking part directly in the
               | enslaving and poisoning of the island's native /s
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | imwillofficial wrote:
               | Yeah, .io represents "Input/Output" as much as .net
               | represents "Network"
               | 
               | Domains often have little connection to their intended
               | meaning.
        
               | mynameisvlad wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | gadders wrote:
           | 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"
        
             | lorenzhs wrote:
             | If your surname contains an "a", say Gaddersby, you could
             | also do "g@dders.by" to confuse people even more
        
               | codethief wrote:
               | Try spelling that, though. :)
        
             | maratc wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | Semaphor wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | davchana wrote:
             | My domain ending in .in is not supported by Discover Bank
             | because it can be used only "in" India.
        
             | ymolodtsov wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | alasdair_ wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | tadzik_ wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | tyingq wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | fennecfoxen wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | Ductapemaster wrote:
               | 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!
        
               | davchana wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | samanator wrote:
             | tsdyq gmvr th!
        
             | dkdbejwi383 wrote:
             | Same using me@domain.cricket or similar. "Do you mean
             | me@domain.com?"
        
             | hc-taway wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | walrus01 wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | mywacaday wrote:
           | Try using a .Irish domain
        
           | dkdbejwi383 wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | mihaaly wrote:
           | ok, ok, but is that really correct?! ;)
        
           | Jonovono wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | archon810 wrote:
             | Is it by chance 420-6969?
        
               | Jonovono wrote:
               | 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
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | Your web page font is unreadably thin.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | 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...
        
             | wcfields wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | hamburglar wrote:
               | 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."
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | I've never seen that and I have dozens of
               | company@me.example emails signed up.
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | toast0 wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | codethief wrote:
             | 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?
        
             | Theory5 wrote:
             | 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).
        
               | DavidAdams wrote:
               | 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?"
        
               | cmehdy wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | chaos_a wrote:
               | 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_c
               | an_...
        
               | usmannk wrote:
               | > 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
        
               | ableal wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | scubbo wrote:
               | > 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`.
        
               | umanwizard wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | scubbo wrote:
               | 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?)
        
               | kevinmgranger wrote:
               | It's explicitly called out in RFC5233, at least:
               | https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5233
        
               | scubbo wrote:
               | TIL, thank you!
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | spoonjim wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | No one wants car rental insurance anyway.
               | 
               | Especially not Hertz, who doesn't honor claims anyway and
               | is thankfully bankrupt.
        
               | spoonjim wrote:
               | I fucked up a truck and they covered it without
               | questions, I guess their customer experience was highly
               | variable.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
               | They are referencing the line about the employee
               | discount.
        
               | spoonjim wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | prostanac wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | vultour wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | shakna wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | fencepost wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | athenot wrote:
             | Same experience, though I never tried to get a discount out
             | of it.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | jguimont wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | vmception wrote:
           | 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
        
           | criddell wrote:
           | My domain has a hyphen in it and I find places that reject it
           | all the time.
        
           | hbosch wrote:
           | I have a very short .co - gets 'em every time.
        
           | mikey_p wrote:
           | 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
        
             | bionade24 wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | dkdbejwi383 wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | tijuco2 wrote:
       | "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
        
       | Paradigm2020 wrote:
       | 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 :).
        
       | matsemann wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | macksd wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | goldcd wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | ghoomketu wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | altgans wrote:
       | 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/
        
         | _jal wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | Try explaining how to type "Bob@naughty-croquet-hieroglyph.kz"
         | in mixed company.
        
         | runnr_az wrote:
         | I built a site for that:
         | https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com
        
           | sabertoothed wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | cptwunderlich wrote:
           | Uff, ph is all sold out :smh:
        
       | ing33k wrote:
       | Borat would say "very nice"
        
       | koboll wrote:
       | I'm kinda disappointed that I can't register an emoji handle. No
       | diamond at hands dot kz for me, I suppose.
        
       | Zelphyr wrote:
       | 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!
        
       | rendall wrote:
       | I went to [lightbulb-emoji].kz and it transformed to http://xn--
       | ds8h.kz
        
         | nancy99 wrote:
         | That is to prevent phishing with latin characters that look
         | identical to normal ones.
        
         | Biganon wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | blfr wrote:
       | The real scoop is Netflix.soy. Excellent.
       | 
       | https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
        
       | leokennis wrote:
       | 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...
        
       | qwerty456127 wrote:
       | Borat would be proud of you.
        
       | plumeria wrote:
       | Ironically, you cannot use emojis for the username (e.g.
       | :crab:@:crab: )
        
         | aaron_oxenrider wrote:
         | 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?
        
       | simias wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | rhythmofrest wrote:
         | 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 PS1000 on
         | Kazakhstani emoji domains?"
        
           | tener wrote:
           | 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...
        
           | tenacious_tuna wrote:
           | 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).
        
             | hilbertseries wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | satellite2 wrote:
             | Classic correlation / causation bias
        
             | baybal2 wrote:
             | There are way more insane people in mental institutions
             | than insane billionaires.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | tiborsaas wrote:
           | A common wallet with a SO freaks me out :)
        
             | sangnoir wrote:
             | 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)
        
           | ALittleLight wrote:
           | I feel like he could've got it going with 5 or 10 emoji and
           | spent a lot less. Also impressed with his commercial.
        
             | simias wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | Grakel wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | _AzMoo wrote:
             | When your family has limited resources and needs to
             | prioritise it's frustrating when somebody chooses to use
             | those resources on frivolity.
        
               | konschubert wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | satellite2 wrote:
               | Freedom
               | 
               | 10EUR
        
               | konschubert wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | tikhonj wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | _AzMoo wrote:
               | For sure, but the original article and the comment I
               | replied to are talking about relatively expensive spends.
        
             | asciimov wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | bcrosby95 wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | rileytg wrote:
           | 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>"
        
           | atleta wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | coolspot wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | konschubert wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | simonbw wrote:
             | I think it's pretty common that when people get married it
             | becomes _our_ money instead of _my_ and _your_ money.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | And _we_ can buy emoji domain names.
        
             | alexchamberlain wrote:
             | It's a matter of trust; my wife and I don't sweat the small
             | stuff, but if we're spending more than PS100 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.
        
           | vz8 wrote:
           | I keep expecting this to tie back to a Borat sequel.
        
           | ljm wrote:
           | 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
           | 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.
        
       | throwaway_kufu wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dmitrygr wrote:
       | > 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...
        
       | EugeneOZ wrote:
       | > and yes, most form validations hate them.
       | 
       | Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously
       | resistant to following the specifications.
        
         | flal_ wrote:
         | 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
        
           | sybercecurity wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | Biganon wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | flal_ wrote:
             | 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...
        
       | ape4 wrote:
       | Why can't you pick an emoji as username
        
       | CyanDeparture wrote:
       | I will never use this, but I'm delighted it exsits.
        
       | petercooper wrote:
       | 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(!) :-)
        
         | Theory5 wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | pull_my_finger wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | Cthulhu_ wrote:
           | Like how many UK businesses and individuals had to give up
           | their .eu domain name after leaving the EU.
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | rorykoehler wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | tialaramex wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | alibarber wrote:
               | 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...
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | 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".
        
               | hedora wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | kyawzazaw wrote:
               | That revenue is tiny compared to being able to say .eu
               | domains for EU orgs and businesses.
        
               | Uberphallus wrote:
               | > They lose domain registration revenue.
               | 
               | I think only micronations have a significant revenue
               | coming from tlds (e.g. Tuvalu)
        
               | tinco wrote:
               | 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?
        
               | dreadlordbone wrote:
               | Who hurt you?
        
               | tinco wrote:
               | The British?
        
               | JamesDeepDown wrote:
               | Fortunately most institutions of the EU are not as
               | absurdly extremist as you are.
        
               | zimpenfish wrote:
               | > 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.
        
               | alwayseasy wrote:
               | A British business suing the EU in an EU court about a
               | contract that explicitly says for EU members? Wouldn't go
               | far.
        
               | rvba wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | beowulfey wrote:
               | .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.
        
               | rendall wrote:
               | Harsh. But fair.
        
               | tshaddox wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | sigio wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | swiley wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | matsemann wrote:
           | Which OP didn't do multiple times and got his purchased
           | annulled. But hopefully in the future, heh.
        
         | SavantIdiot wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | taneliv wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | dmitriid wrote:
         | > 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
        
           | worldofmatthew wrote:
           | Aka why I mainly stick with .com
        
             | belval wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | vxNsr wrote:
               | 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. I tried reaching out to him to see
               | if he was interested in taking like .org but he's not :(
               | so I got .me
        
               | SavantIdiot wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | davchana wrote:
               | Exactly, I too had to use .net & .us, because.com was
               | registered in 1995.
        
           | smartbit wrote:
           | 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._
        
           | kuschku wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | kureikain wrote:
       | 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
        
         | holistio wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | kureikain wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | kwhitefoot wrote:
         | It works. But what is it for? How do other people interact with
         | it and the images?
         | 
         | I like the commenting idea.
        
         | tzfld wrote:
         | >https://pix.fastloop.xyz
         | 
         | Nice but I see some risks there
         | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)
        
           | kureikain wrote:
           | wow, thanks so much for that information. I'll have it
           | migrate to some different domain.
        
       | kalipso wrote:
       | 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
        
         | simias wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | magneticnorth wrote:
           | Diamond hands appears to be taken everywhere listed by the
           | mainstream emoji registration sites, sadly. It was a good
           | idea
        
           | rileytg wrote:
           | way ahead of you... OP was right, it was a pain to use that
           | registrar.
        
         | roozbeh18 wrote:
         | hah
        
       | siltpotato wrote:
       | I've been seeing more of this title recently and can't suss out
       | the pattern. Is this about it?
       | 
       | "I x'd (something ridiculous) [and (more ridiculous)]"
        
       | tener wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | chias wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | tener wrote:
           | 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...
        
       | aequitas wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dheera wrote:
       | This seems ripe for phishing, similar to @arr[?]e.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/
        
       | sideproject wrote:
       | 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
        
       | weinzierl wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | blackearl wrote:
       | 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
        
       | felixfbecker wrote:
       | How does this work? Is it converted to some super ugly punycode,
       | or do domains actually support full Unicode?
        
       | simonbarker87 wrote:
       | This is delightful, enjoy your massive headache running this
       | thing
        
       | vmception wrote:
       | > 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.)
        
         | notsureaboutpg wrote:
         | >I always have shelf businesses registered and available for
         | this.
         | 
         | Don't you pay an annual fee for these?
        
       | Gys wrote:
       | > 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.
        
       | jkhdigital wrote:
       | > complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji"
       | 
       | Almost spit out my coffee laughing at this
        
       | had-rien wrote:
       | 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 :/
        
       | latexr wrote:
       | > 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...
        
       | zacharycohn wrote:
       | You're a monster. This was a delightful read.
        
       | silentsea90 wrote:
       | 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
        
       | AndyMcConachie wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | e-clinton wrote:
       | 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
        
       | anoncow wrote:
       | Ben Stokes is also a very popular English cricketer.
        
       | marckohlbrugge wrote:
       | 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
        
       | LeonM wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | swiley wrote:
         | I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't expect something like this
         | to work reliably.
        
           | thatguy0900 wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | notsureaboutpg wrote:
           | This isn't true at all. Many many many of my non-technical
           | family members would not have any clue why emoji domain names
           | and emoji email addresses could not be used. They love emoji
           | (like most people) and want to use them everywhere. And if
           | someone offered them an emoji email address, they'd easily
           | pay for it and expect it to work like gmail/hotmail/yahoo
           | 
           | They would not understand the following terms: unicode,
           | punycode, domain name, mailserver, mail forwarding, tld. They
           | would even probably reply to the wrong email (the website
           | shows that the emoji email forwards mail to a normal email
           | which sends the mail to you, so you should not click "Reply"
           | on any email forwarded from this service to you).
           | 
           | Don't assume customers' expectations.
        
         | kureikain wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mrtksn wrote:
           | 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?
        
             | ilaksh wrote:
             | And soon to be the official currency of Starbase, Texas.
             | Apparently. Although I might be misinterpreting Musk's
             | tweet. He definitely said Dodge though.
        
           | mihaaly wrote:
           | 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!
           | 
           | ;)
        
           | LeonM wrote:
           | > 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.
        
             | rorykoehler wrote:
             | Caveat emptor
        
             | lenkite wrote:
             | 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..
        
             | kristopolous wrote:
             | 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
        
             | diogenesjunior wrote:
             | >We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this
             | 
             | UWU US HACKER NEWS USERS ARE SO INTELLIGENT!!!
             | 
             | Worse than reddit.
        
               | thatguy0900 wrote:
               | I mean, normally I would agree with you, but here it's
               | the case. Someone is paying for an email, address, they
               | will expect it to work. Noone knows how email actually
               | works, why should they.
        
             | kureikain wrote:
             | Thank you for open my mind. I see your point now.
        
             | ethbr0 wrote:
             | And for a long time, no one used email for anything
             | important.
             | 
             | Very few new things emerge feature-complete.
        
               | Invictus0 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | ethbr0 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | thatguy0900 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | a1369209993 wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | kwhitefoot wrote:
               | How do you pay your taxes with email?
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | dylan604 wrote:
           | >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.
        
         | dmingod666 wrote:
         | 'Serious', 'enterprise'.. and email addresses ending in star
         | emoji, eggplant emoji.. wonder how that venn diagram would look
         | like..
        
           | path411 wrote:
           | Yes but yourname@[computer] is quite appealing for a dev. I
           | already bought it from OP
        
         | insert_coin wrote:
         | > 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.
        
         | kirykl wrote:
         | 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
        
         | shp0ngle wrote:
         | This service doesn't support even sending, just receiving. So I
         | don't think there is DKIM even considered.
        
           | sofixa wrote:
           | Or SPF for that matter.
        
             | toxik wrote:
             | It should have an SPF record saying nobody can send as that
             | domain.
        
           | motoboi wrote:
           | It needs DKIM so other people cannot send e-mail pretending
           | to be you.
        
           | LeonM wrote:
           | It says send support is 'coming soon' on the website, so
           | expectations are already set for those paying for this
           | service.
        
       | Dries007 wrote:
       | 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 :)
        
       | vbezhenar wrote:
       | Please note that all kz domains must be served by servers located
       | inside Kazakhstan.
        
       | rntksi wrote:
       | Can you have emoji@emoji.emoji email address?
       | 
       | So your email address would just be 5 "characters" including the
       | @ and the dot
        
       | cyberlab wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | finiteseries wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | easyKL wrote:
       | 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.....
        
         | Symbiote wrote:
         | I just bought (not with the free deal) a one-letter emoji .cf
         | domain name. EUR9 at Freenom.com.
         | 
         | (It would probably have been better to use the free deal for a
         | few months first.)
        
       | johnbatch wrote:
       | I'm surprised it doesn't support emoji in the name field. No
       | <emoji>@<emoji>.kz
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | 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>
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | RFC 6531 adds support for internationalized local-parts.
           | Support in actual software may be lacking though.
        
             | ganzsz wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | 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...
        
       | Doctor_Fegg wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | scandox wrote:
         | > Everything involved with email is pain.
         | 
         | Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.
        
           | ludamad wrote:
           | What would you have done differently?
        
             | 177tcca wrote:
             | Probably not run an email server. =[
        
         | tcgv wrote:
         | > 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-...
        
           | zimpenfish wrote:
           | > 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?
        
         | dieortin wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | TimBurr wrote:
           | 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!
        
         | amenod wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | notsureaboutpg wrote:
           | But in one year he'll have almost doubled his investment
           | unless subscriptions all cancel within the year (highly
           | unlikely with things like domain names / email addresses /
           | etc.)
        
           | texasbigdata wrote:
           | That was before HN though! You have any idea how many
           | eggplant emoji handles he's sold since?
        
         | manquer wrote:
         | Depends. If he is actually running only a forwarder , it is
         | much easier than running an full fledged service with mailboxes
         | and other support.
        
           | LeonM wrote:
           | Running a 'forwarder' still means that you have manage the
           | MTAs, and all the infrastructure around it. It's still a lot
           | of work.
        
       | closeparen wrote:
       | This is awesome. But why make the recipient copy and paste the
       | reply address? Can't you use the Reply-To header?
        
       | unnouinceput wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | had-rien wrote:
         | 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
         | 
         | ---------
        
       | monstersinF wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | That seems completely unrelated to an email service, especially
         | if most of its users are outside of Kazakhstan.
        
           | qmarchi wrote:
           | .kz registrants, like many ccTLDs, are required to host core
           | services within the borders of Kazakhstan.
        
         | scaladev wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | dbrgn wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | totetsu wrote:
       | Emojis are "fun" in the same way hallmark melody greeting cards
       | are "fun"
        
       | amenod wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | Abuse by spammers and criminals, DDoS and hacking attempts for
         | starters.
         | 
         | Lots of spam complaints to handle manually. Also payments using
         | stolen credit cards.
        
         | kureikain wrote:
         | 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
        
       | bikson wrote:
       | I'm still don't know why emoji's are a thing.
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | People like to communicate their emotions through cute
         | pictograms, it's not difficult to understand.
        
           | Biganon wrote:
           | 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
        
         | macksd wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | sshagent wrote:
       | I think i might have realised I've become old, when the very idea
       | of an emoji domain causes me anger. _sigh_
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | sshagent wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | robotbikes wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | thrwyoilarticle wrote:
             | 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.
        
             | ttt0 wrote:
             | I'm not old and I hate it. I don't even know how to insert
             | an emoji on a computer.
        
       | mfkp wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | prepend wrote:
       | > 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-...
        
         | mns wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | prepend wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | kureikain wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | wccrawford wrote:
         | Can confirm. This bit me recently until I thought to use
         | another account for testing.
        
         | tyingq wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | prepend wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | davchana wrote:
           | 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
        
         | Tyr42 wrote:
         | Should be in your sent folder right?
        
           | prepend wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | abdullahkhalids wrote:
         | Is this some sort of abuse protection, where people use gmail
         | as free storage?
        
           | LeonM wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | 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"
        
               | prepend wrote:
               | Maybe similar to this, but it works if my message stays
               | in gmail when I send from my gmail straight to my gmail.
        
           | prepend wrote:
           | 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."
        
             | kube-system wrote:
             | 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
        
               | prepend wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | rwmj wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | nashashmi wrote:
           | But if you send yourself an email, you will get it? How does
           | deduplication work for that?
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | rplnt wrote:
       | Cool, but I also wish this wouldn't exist.
        
       | heleninboodler wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Thoughtful wrote:
       | Emojis in subject lines can sometimes cause issues with ticketing
       | systems, so I can only imagine how ticketing systems will like
       | emojis as domains.
        
       | beiller wrote:
       | 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"
        
       | williesleg wrote:
       | Hooray?
        
       | sitzkrieg wrote:
       | the author may like to know Cyrillic doesn't automatically mean
       | Russian
        
         | simias wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | scaladev wrote:
           | >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").
        
           | sitzkrieg wrote:
           | ah wow neat
        
       | acvny wrote:
       | This promotional video is epic:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c
        
       | sixhobbits wrote:
       | 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
        
         | sixhobbits wrote:
         | oh HN doesn't support emojis - that is
         | g@<unicorn-emoji>.kz
         | 
         | or                   g@<unicorn-emoji>
        
           | kuon wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | wohfab wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | The .ai TLD has an A record, so http://ai/ works.
        
               | kuon wrote:
               | Yes, this I understand. But not the other way around.
        
               | Biganon wrote:
               | 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
        
           | sschueller wrote:
           | I am also confused. I assume the email address would always
           | be postfixed with .kz or the email would not arrive.
        
             | bellyfullofbac wrote:
             | 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.
        
           | _s wrote:
           | g@<emoji>.kz
        
         | mminer237 wrote:
         | 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
        
       | CalChris wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-11 23:00 UTC)