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Show HN: Personalized email addresses for your entire family
- jesperht 8y agoCame up with the idea for this with my wife and decided to build it! Been dogfooding it with my family and am now sharing it with the rest of the world. Tech stack is Node/Express running on Dokku/Digital Ocean for the API. UI is built using Parcel and hosted on Netlify. Would love to hear your thoughts and happy to answer any questions you folks may have :-)
- sokoloff 8y agoI run a similar for my family and deliverability has been the on-going issue. Every year or so I have to make some kind of update because some mail admin or other changes their setup and they start flagging our outbound mail (from foo@sokoloff.com) as junk/spam. It's a good idea and I wish you the best of luck, but I am curious how you handle the outbound deliverability.
- jesperht 8y agoThanks for the feedback! This is certainly a concern and one that I've tried to avoid by focusing on receiving (forwarded) email and not sending for the following reasons: * Easier setup - nothing to configure and you can keep using your existing email setup. Using email clients can be very difficult for some people, especially older folks, so I don't want to make their lives harder by forcing them to learn something new. * Less maintenance/upkeep - not having to worry about storing/sending/retrying means that users have a better UX. I'd love to easily integrate sending from the custom email, and I may add it in the future for the power users, but I think the cost/benefit of it right now just isn't worth it so I'll keep things Simple©.
- indigodaddy 8y agoAssuming you are making use of Netlify's Identity service, and also their free tier value added dynamic integration leveraging Lambda?
- jesperht 8y agoNetlify is purely hosting static content and proxying requests to the API on DO which is doing all the dynamic stuff.
- indigodaddy 8y agoYou might think about adding chat into the mix. You could look at possibly rebasing onto Crossbox ( https://crossbox.io https://crossbox.io ),which also incorporates chat + some other stuff (I have no affiliation, just stumbled across it recently and the demo is pretty attractive). Or you could probably easily add an XMPP chat server/service onto whatever you've already built..
- indigodaddy 8y agoShould have noted your comments about your custom app/techstack, so forgive my comment about "rebasing" onto something else. However I still think incorporating a chat feature would add value and believe there would certainly be interest for it.
- josh_fyi 8y agoGreat idea! But the vast majority of people will find that their family name is taken.
- jesperht 8y agoYup, definitely a challenge and the reason why I try to suggest lots of different TLDs as well as some simple mutations like name + "family". I'm still trying to figure out how else I can open it up for more useful domain names that don't become completely convoluted.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago"the"+familyname+"s" might be another one to try, yeah my last name is also the name of a big company, and the Spanish word for Bull, so my options are limited in getting a "family name type of domain" only 1 of the options cropped up
- indigodaddy 8y agoA mutation that can be tried is removing the vowels from the last name. You might find it available, and also (at least for my fairly short, one syllable surname) almost makes the domain look and sound almost better and more smooth/flowy.
- TheGrumpyBrit 8y agoWhen I got married, I seriously considered taking my wifes name, for no other reason than the .co.uk was available.
- sjroot 8y agoThis is cool but, even with a relatively uncommon last name, every single possible domain shows up as taken.
- jesperht 8y agoBummer, sorry to hear it. Shoot me an email at jesper@namekin.com with your family name and I'll see if I can manually generate some suggestions for you that work :-)
- sjroot 8y agoThe domain I actually own for this purpose, <last name>.fyi, doesn't appear to be on the list of suggestions. You should add that TLD. :)
- shshhdhs 8y agoI have an uncommon last name, and some domain broker contacted me that the domain squatter wants to sell it for $25,000+ (USD). It's honestly not worth even $1,000, and there's like only 20 people in the world who would want it. I openly laughed out loud for a while.
- 8y ago
- thecatspaw 8y agoI suggest making pricing a bit more obvious. You arent collecting actionable (ie current email or similar to follow up) information prior to showing the price either, so I am not sure what you gain by hiding it.
- jesperht 8y agoThat's a great point - wasn't intentionally "hiding" it, but you're absolutely right that by not collecting any e-mails I'll be missing out on plenty of opportunities. Will see if I can work it in without making it creepy + adding some pricing details to the main page. Appreciate you taking the time to look and giving feedback.
- konschubert 8y agoI think the suggestion was the other way around :D
- jesperht 8y agoHah, I guess I'm trying to do both! Either way: Pricing is now on the main landing page together with the sale messaging :-) Thanks for the feedback folks!
- ykevinator 8y agoIt's a great idea that a lot if families need. It's not clear what it costs and its not clear if we use our name domain or your domain and what happens if it's not available. The white glove service is spot on, the person who would pay for this would not be the person who would know how to do it themselves. And finally, this is a great anti Facebook family product and I think you should mention that somewhere. Hth
- jesperht 8y agoThanks for taking a peek and your comments really highlight a need for me to make the pricing and explanation of the service much more clear. We generate several domain name suggestions based on your family name, you pick the one you like, and then we take care of registering and managing the domain for you. I also like the anti-facebook angle, great point.
- wingerlang 8y agoWhy do you think families need this?
- jesperht 8y agoCost bit should hopefully be a bit more clear now, put on the main landing page along with the December sale section :)
- evan_ 8y agoI happen to own mylastname.org and it has kind of been a problem if I’m being honest. I finally had to start start carrying around cards with my email address printed on them. People can’t handle it, they expect personal names to come before the @ and if you say anything after the @ besides gmail or hotmail or a business name they absolutely shut down. I’m sure it doesn’t help that my last name seems like it’s misspelled...
- giancarlostoro 8y agoThis is precisely why I still give people my gmail, I realized if I wanna use a totally custom email I have to carry around a business card. I just might start carrying business cards soon either way, it's a subtle way for me to get myself out there when trying to network and meet new people.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI keep a gmail account that forwards and deletes any received email to my hosted email. I use it for these types of businesses/people.
- dawnerd 8y agoSimilar with my business email. Had to end up buying a way shorter version because people just can’t spell.
- grimjack00 8y ago
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI think even just offering @namekin.com as an option, and allowing people to start mailing lists for their families would be awesome as well (of course, offering this for the domain option works too). Since some last names are way too common, it could even make sense to figure out a good list of most common domains to buy ahead of time and offer to use them to families. Of course you gotta make sure they understand other families with the same last name could be using those domains. You could offer a single @namekin email as a sample of the whole service as well, which might go a long way and get you more feedback.
- jesperht 8y agoHoly cow I can't believe I didn't think of this, that's a great idea. I was struggling with finding a good way to hook people in with a freemium option, and this could be it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoNo problem, I love this idea, it would be nice to see more than just gmail and other providers out there. I also love your web layout it's really nice.
- sanqui 8y agoI put in my family name, which contains a letter with a diacritic mark. It showed every domain as "unavailable". I suggest normalizing to ASCII.
- jesperht 8y agoWhoops, that's certainly an oversight. Thanks for pointing it out, will make sure that gets fixed :-)
- sanqui 8y agoYou're welcome. I like the concept. You might also want to check which TLDs support international domain names (IDNs) and which don't. The Czech TLD .cz, for example, doesn't[1], even though Czech is heavy on letters with them. [1] https://www.háčkyčárky.cz/ https://www.xn--hkyrky-ptac70bc.cz/
- jesperht 8y agoAh, TIL - had no idea :-) BTW, I deployed a fix which will hopefully fix the diacritic bug you mentioned in case you'd like to give it another go!
- amelius 8y agoLooks great, but one concern is lock-in or name hijacking. How do you guarantee that if I buy my domain name with you, it will actually be mine and not yours? This is important if I wish to migrate to a different provider one day without asking all my contacts to change my email address.
- jesperht 8y agoGreat question. We mention it in our ToS that we are happy to transfer the domain whenever you want in case you want to take your business elsewhere.
- WhitneyLand 8y agoSeems like a nicely designed, friendly project to arrive for the holiday season. Nice job.
- jesperht 8y agoThank you for the kind words, happy you enjoyed it!
- wtmt 8y agoIt looks quite cheap for someone with a larger family. But there's nothing substantial on the privacy page. I'd expect at least some more verbiage on how data will be handled and won't be handled. It also doesn't state how much disk space quota is allocated, how many mails can be sent, whether each user can choose multiple aliases, and any other limits that come close to what's considered abuse. Tangentially, it's also amusing to see "family name" so ingrained in so many cultures that it's assumed that people who are part of a family will have a common name. Around the world, this implicit assumption breaks so many things for the people who culturally don't follow these (including visa applications, website forms, etc.). See point #20 here. [1] [1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- jesperht 8y agoThanks for taking a look. At the moment it's only handing receiving email, not sending - disk quota/etc are unnecessary. Cheers that link about names, really good point and quite interesting!