17 ms·

Gail.com FAQ

926 points by weatherlight 4y ago

dagenix 4y ago
I don't know anything about this Brazilian Gail company, but I hope nobody uses them.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  Looking their website, looks like we can all complain at suelen@gail.com.br :))
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
codegladiator 4y ago
[flagged]
- VoidWhisperer 4y ago
  The website in this post is not listed there - it may have been useful to fully read the image you linked before posting it.
- rerdavies 4y ago
  But it does provide interest perspective on the cost of not owning THE domain name for their company. Perhaps they should rename the company. Disclaimer lest their be any mistake: I am totally charmed and bedazzled by the real gail.com, and hope that web archeologists of the future will still find gail.com running a hundred years from now. I just thought the post didn't deserve downvotes.
e61133e3 4y ago
"my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain." WOW
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
FlyingSnake 4y ago
Reading this felt like a trip through a portal into the nascent Internet in late 90s. I hope this never goes down.
- raesene9 4y ago
  My favourite 90's style website, that's still running, is http://www.armory.com/armory.html http://www.armory.com/armory.html , complete with FTP Index and user finger files.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Blocked by our company filter as an "adult" resource, so you might have to add a NSFW warning there.
    - mathieuh 4y ago
      There's nothing actually NSFW at the link, just your filter being overzealous
      - fmajid 4y ago
        Perhaps they are confusing it with the San Francisco Armory, a historic building the NIMBY neighbors blocked from being converted into housing so a porn company bought it instead and turned it into a production company instead.
        andreareina 4y ago
        Not anymore I’m afraid. Sold in 2018 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory
        fragmede 4y ago
        They used to host their own servers there, but it went the way of the cloud.
samwillis 4y ago
See also http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/ Background here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comp...
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Another one that used to amuse me every time I mistook its domain for that of the magazine was http://www.theeconomist.com http://www.theeconomist.com, but I see it is now long gone. Here is an Archive link for reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119083638/http://www.theeconomist.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130119083638/http://www.theeco...
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  http://steam.com/ http://steam.com/ used to be similar, but apparently they sold out later. I guess nothing is permanent. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013203919/http://www.steam.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161013203919/http://www.steam.... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220730090724/http://www.steam.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220730090724/http://www.steam.... (The site is offline at the moment.)
  - smcl 4y ago
    I think this is a good example of how if your desired username/domain is already taken, there’s usually a clever tweak you can do to get a similar one that works. In the case of Steam they went with “steampowered.com” instead. It makes me wonder why so many people go with like “firstname225” rather than spending a couple of minutes coming up with something little bit less silly-looking. In fact there was a funny thing for a while where a user iterated through all the @kevin(number) Twitter users every Friday: https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-is-getting-to-know-every-kevin-on-twitter https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-i...
    - pcai 4y ago
      There are like 8 billion humans alive at any given moment though, so this trick doesn’t scale for usernames. “Just be a little creative” has been extremely unlikely to work for years now at say…gmail
gregjw 4y ago
Great sense of humour
charcircuit 4y ago
It must have been nice to have been alive in the early internet where barely any domains were taken. On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.
- FlyingSnake 4y ago
  Thanks to domain squatters, the internet businesses have to come up with weird nerdy names like shopify, YouTube, reddit, hooli etc.
  - defrost 4y ago
    It's more than just domain squatting .. a business often wants a fresh name that uniquely searches to their business. Once upon a time search for songs by The The on youtube was a nightmare, that, at least, has improved.
- mattlondon 4y ago
  They were much more expensive in those days IIRC - today they are the cost of a couple of coffees, those days they were more like 25% the cost of a new computer... per year! It was also quite inaccessible in terms of purchasing - contracts, call our sales team etc. Things like GoDaddy were still either non-existent or very nascent in the mid-late 90s when I was just starting out as a early teen online. I had dreams as a youngster of owning my own domain name (just one!) and running my own site there... Now I don't even know how many domains I own!
  - pigtailgirl 4y ago
    -- in the early 90s you could easily get domains for free - there were many registrars who would give you free .com or .co.uk in return an iframe that advertised the registrar! - this all but disappeared after 1995 =( --
    - aembleton 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gourneau 4y ago
From the page source :) 
- kome 4y ago
  it is not "unexciting by Internet standards". what the heck, it is gorgeous.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Yup, not even a SIC but some regal mane cat.
  - julian_sark 4y ago
    I find it even technically outstanding. Is that some sort of natural Moire pattern on it's back? Spliced-in turkey genes? I find this cat oddly fascinating.
    - hoseja 4y ago
      It's fur waviness, I think.
    - petercooper 4y ago
      Maybe it had been sleeping in that box. The cardboard has a similarly distanced pattern.
- sdrinf 4y ago
  sooooo fluffy <3
- walrus01 4y ago
  Makes me wonder at how much bandwidth would be consumed by putting an image of the cat embedded in the page, with the volume of unique people typoing gmail.com on a daily basis. You probably wouldn't want it to be a 8.5MB PNG
- deleted 4y ago
massimosgrelli 4y ago
It's so refreshing to see someone on the Internet not looking to make easy money showing off some lousy advertising. I would love to know more about the author; she's most likely interesting.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  it's he. website name is his wife's name.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    The author certainly claims to be Gail themselves; note the reference to “my husband”
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      Ok i could be wrong. Was commenting after reading arbitration documents where respondent is referred as "The Respondent is Kevin Watson" https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d2006-0655.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200... "The Respondent registered the domain name <gail.com> on April 4, 1996, named after his wife’s given name, as a birthday present for his wife. " So yes, looks like was wrong. It's his wife's site (A gift)
      - avree 4y ago
        Yes, that's what the link that you're commenting on says. You didn't need to do any more research, especially not into arbitration documents.
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Yeah I like the pic of her cat.
gustavorg 4y ago
[flagged]
- toyg 4y ago
  People like you are why we can't have nice things.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Had you been raised in a prison, that everything must be transactional? also, https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/ucha20/2002/ucha20.v015.i03/09332480.2002.10554810/production/09332480.2002.10554810.fp.png_v03 https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t...
  - walrus01 4y ago
    Maybe the commenter was raised by Wall Street finance persons. Might not be that different.
- truculent 4y ago
  In fact, if they killed the goose, who knows how much gold there might be inside!
aledalgrande 4y ago
Anyone else wish there was an upvote button on the site? Or a guest book, 90s style?
Brajeshwar 4y ago
GAIL[1] is also the name of a publicly traded Indian Oil Company. Just like most pre-Internet companies that "comes online", they also went with gailonline.com just like how SBI went with sbionline.com. However, for SBI, I saw recently that they have become pretty Internet savvy -- they own the `.sbi` TLD. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL
- davchana 4y ago
  Yes, they do use bank.sbi & bankonline.sbi as redirect on some pages; for banking. For general information, they use sbi.co.in
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    Any idea how that can be done by entrepreneurs without having $180k in the bank? Is there a link one can read up on it? This looks like insert free real estate meme to me
    - FinnKuhn 4y ago
      It can't be done without paying between 150k and 300k, because that is simply the price for a TLD... a short how to register your own TLD can be found here: https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-domain-name-like-com-org-and-net-jhd https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-dom...
- fmajid 4y ago
  Also a bakery chain in the UK, https://gailsbread.co.uk/ https://gailsbread.co.uk/ (Gail.co.uk is squatted by a speculator).
  - Jarmsy 4y ago
    I've always heard the bakery referred to as "Gail's"
- causi 4y ago
lIl-IIIl 4y ago
From the domain takeover decision: "vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;" Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? It is obviously not unlikely that the someone has never heard of this obscure "manufacturer and distributor of ceramic products for architectural use" company.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? This is a summary of claims. Lawyers are generally allowed to make claims based on incomplete information which they believe that they can show to the legally-required standard. Necessarily, in an adversarial proceeding where there is a material dispute of fact, some claims of one side or the other will be rejected.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- julian_sark 4y ago
  I learned that lawyers are allowed to lie like there's no tomorrow, especially in civil cases pre-trial, in my jurisdiction. This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading). The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans. I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.
  - alex_suzuki 4y ago
    Fascinating. I live in Switzerland where downloading is legal but uploading is not. So basically if you downloaded a hypothetical torrent, and set upload bandwidth to zero, you‘re safe. I guess the lawyer could argue that I’m a bumbling idiot who forgot to turn off the upload facility…?
johnnyApplePRNG 4y ago
I made a small fortune off of a website called "utube" on google of all search engines back when youtube.com was taking off.
- zone411 4y ago
  Wow, that's one of the best misspellings you could have.
m00dy 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jore 4y ago
it reminds me of http://milk.com/faq/ http://milk.com/faq/
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  That took me by surprise :D
rerdavies 4y ago
Perhaps we should start a Go Fund Me to create a permanent endowment for gail.com so that it never goes away. This is a precious piece of internet history that deserves to be preserved for future generations.
walrus01 4y ago
See also , the long and complicated story of nissan.com and the guy who got sued for using his own family name for a domain
SilverBirch 4y ago
Can you imagine - hey hunny, you know that domain name that I bought you ages back? Yeah, well we're getting sued by a brazilian ceramics company...
anonymous344 4y ago
Can someone please clarify the USA legal basis Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark ?? I tought that the .com domains were 100% free of that bullshit..or how else is there so many domain shakals reserving thousands of domains..? related to their appeal: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d2006-0655.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200...
- lfodofod 4y ago
  >Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark Well duh? Anyone can sue you for anything and say anything.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 2Pacalypse- 4y ago
  Not only they can sue you, but they can make your life a living hell if you choose to fight them back. See one of the most famous examples: http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    Given that there's an image on that page that simply links to an expired domain, I wonder if this might be a better source: https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-spent-8-years-fighting-the-car-company-with-1822815832 https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-spent-8-years-fighting-the-c...
tunnuz 4y ago
Why does the website get so many visits? Sorry for the dumb question I think I miss a reference here.
- Armic 4y ago
  It's a misspelling of gmail.com
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dark-star 4y ago
    Ah! That makes sense, thanks for clearing that up. I was wondering the same thing and had to search the comments for an explanation
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  It seems likely that most visitors simply mistype gmail.com and end up visiting gail.com by mistake.
  - tunnuz 4y ago
    I see. That makes sense. On a related note, I recall that when Gmail came out another domain (Gamil.com) had a funny banner on top saying:"Gamil is not Gmail, but we're glad you're here!".
anttiharju 4y ago
> "There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain" [...] > "My husband and I" [...] > "If you have a question not answered above, feel free to send it to: faq at gail period com" I wonder if the emails sent to the faq inbox would bounce haha
- blensor 4y ago
  Well one of the two email addresses could actually be faq
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  It goes to her husband, Franklin Albrecht Quade.
fishbacon 4y ago
Sort of reminds me of the foo at https://www.bar.com/ https://www.bar.com/ Although Gail seems to be blessed with not receiving most of the email people are sending.
jaredsohn 4y ago
Sort of related: https://asdf.com/asdfemail.html https://asdf.com/asdfemail.html is still going strong. "You would never guess how many people use asdf@asdf.com (or some variant form) as a filler email address across the Internet. Opening up @asdf.com lets in hundreds of email messages a day pertaining to porn site registrations, real audio downloading, mailing lists dealing with Windows NT ... the list goes on and on! If you would really like to send us an email, you can do so here."
- JackFr 4y ago
  A person I know whose initials are actually ASDF complains that it’s always taken as a user name. (Although she does enjoy initialing things with just her first and last initial - AF)
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Oh their real email is absolutely brilliant :)
- ploum 4y ago
  This opened up my eyes. My pseudo is "ploum" and I have the ploum.net domain since 2006/2007. I’ve used the ploum@ploum.net adress for years but it became unbearable regarding spam. It took me this post to make the link that, in France, "ploum ploum" means "whatever random thing" and that surely people are filling "ploum@ploum" as a random address in every web form. Must be even worse for the ploum.com domain.
  - lurker_jMckQT99 4y ago
    That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf". Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?
    - loginatnine 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 4y ago
I remember a while back "gamil.com" used to be a website that offered email services.
- napolux 4y ago
  gmail.it (an italian email provider) website is still active
FpUser 4y ago
Big like ;)
pachico 4y ago
Maybe because I don't understand modern CSS and part of the most new HTML markup, but I kinda enjoy reading this type of source code.
- lurker_jMckQT99 4y ago
  I ignore what standard the page follows but the code looks like it was generated or written by someone with little knowledge about CSS. Among other things, code is duplicated all over the place ; everything is globally centered, before every element being individually aligned to left. This is what it would look like with proper "boring old" html/css written back in the days https://jsfiddle.net/dgtvjn5x/ https://jsfiddle.net/dgtvjn5x/ (more readable and slightly lighter) For the sake of completeness: -it would require a more verbose doctype or none depending on when it was written ; - the "style" element would also require a "type" attribute until some point in time ; - "border: none" isn't required anymore, browsers have stopped adding border around images. PS. this is just a comment about how html/css can still be easy and straightforward these days. I do not mean to undermine the fact that the owner did the right thing with regard to standing for and protecting the domain (and promoting eff :)).
rwmj 4y ago
This reminds me of the old purple.com FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611055145/http://www.purple.com/faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020611055145/http://www.purple... Sadly I just checked the live site and it appears they did sell out in the end.
- philshem 4y ago
  https://www.isoldpurple.com/ https://www.isoldpurple.com/
pvsukale3 4y ago
My first thought after reading Gail.com was GAIL a government owned public sector company in India, it mostly deals in natural gas business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL
sonofaragorn 4y ago
Why keep the domain if you don't plan on monetizing it? What's the point?
- executesorder66 4y ago
  Why do you breathe without monetizing it? What's the point? Why do you take a dump without monetizing it? What's the point? Why do you listen to music, or watch a movie without monetizing it? What's the point? You must have a very sad life with the world view that you have.
- mfcl 4y ago
  You didn't get money for posting that comment and yet...
- diegoperini 4y ago
  > What's the point? Being a good example as a citizen of the internet by not exploiting people who mistype the address.
- basscomm 4y ago
  It turns out that sometimes people buy things or do things for reasons other than trying to figure out a way to squeeze money out of it.
Terretta 4y ago
As the site[^1] is unavailable for me, here's a cache from https://archive.vn/CQVsS https://archive.vn/CQVsS … Hello and welcome to the gail.com FAQ. Q: Why isn't there any content here? Can't you at least throw up a picture of your cat for the Internet to check out? A: Sorry, I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards. As for why there is very little content here, we wanted to keep the server's attack surface as small as possible to keep it safe. Q: Interested in selling gail.com? A: Sorry, no. Q: How did you manage to get gail.com? A: My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996. Q: How many times a day is this page visited? A: In 2020 this page received a total of 5,950,012 hits, which is an average of 16,257 per day. Looking at just unique hits, we received a total of 1,295,284, for an average of 3,539 unique hits per day. Occasionally, we get Twitter-bombed and may get several tens of thousands of visitors a day. As an example, on July 21st 2020 we received 109,316 hits. Q: Why is your website so popular? Are you one of those famous people that no one knows why they're famous? A: No, I'm not famous. It seems likely that most visitors simply mistype gmail.com and end up visiting gail.com by mistake. Q: I tried to send some photos to my girlfriend and typed gail.com instead of gmail.com in the address field. The photos were of a very personal nature. Can you please delete them? A: There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain, so it is extremely likely that your photos were rejected by my e-mail provider and tossed into the bit bucket. Another interesting gail.com factoid: my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain. Q: I think you're infringing on my trademark... A: If you consult with someone well versed in trademark law, they will tell you that you can't have an exclusive trademark on a common word or name. My husband and I successfully defended ourselves against an attempted domain takeover in 2006; see WIPO Case D2006-0655[^2] for more information. Q: Are you interested in monetizing gail.com? A: No, but thanks for asking. Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money? A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below. If you believe in a free Internet, please consider clicking on the link and donating to the EFF. If you have a question not answered above, feel free to send it to: faq at gail period com. Thanks for visiting. -Gail ___ 1. screenshot: https://archive.vn/CQVsS/b0c07d01ede677c3cc5f6d5212430d6a6beb2c2c/scr.png https://archive.vn/CQVsS/b0c07d01ede677c3cc5f6d5212430d6a6be... 2. archived case: https://archive.vn/8FaFU https://archive.vn/8FaFU
Amorymeltzer 4y ago
Previous discussions of note: -2021, 109 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283890 -2017, 160 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 I am always happy to see this reposted, though.
- weatherlight 4y ago
  An email i got from the moderators Hi weatherlight, The submission "Gail.com FAQ" that you posted to Hacker News in September 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956204) looks good, but didn't get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so using this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/repost?[REDACTED]. If you use the same account (weatherlight), title, and URL, the software will give the repost an upvote from the mods, and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[REDACTED]), which will give it a random placement on HN's front page, usually within 24 hours (depending on how many stories are in the pool). If you have any questions, please let us know. If you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again. Thanks for posting good things to HN! Daniel (moderator)
  - Amorymeltzer 4y ago
    Wasn’t suggesting you did anything wrong! Just pointing folks to other worthwhile discussions/comments.
    - weatherlight 4y ago
      Sorry! and no worries!
  - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    I've had a link that did way better in the second chance pool. It was really neat, I wouldn't have guessed it existed until I got the email. Definitely refreshing to have human moderation for things like this.
londons_explore 4y ago
The owner could at least have put a helpful link to gmail.com at the top. Would have saved millions of minor frustrations for millions of people. Or, since they seem not to be using the root of the domain for anything but a smug FAQ, just an HTTP 302 redirect.
- palijer 4y ago
  They are doing a ridiculously great thing with the position they found themselves in and of course people still have criticism about it. Gail if you do see this you are an absolute badass and a fantastic member of the Internet community, thanks for what you've done here.
- OOPMan 4y ago
  Cry more
- uconnectlol 4y ago
  American logic. Thing exists, something has to be done about it!
bmitc 4y ago
Everyone needs a little punk in their life, and this is punk. "I ain't gonna be part of this system. Maaaaaaannn." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  "My dad's not a phone. Duhhhh!" LMAO
jest 4y ago
Yeah, I can sympathize... I've been using "jest" as my nickname since college years, like 25 years now. Now I'm bothered when someone upgrades @jest in their JavaScript project on GitHub or BitBucket
- borbulon 4y ago
  @TODO is a real person on github as well
Garbage 4y ago
This is awesome. I have following 2 domains, which are a popular misspellings :) 1. https://geethub.com/ https://geethub.com/ 2. https://geetlab.com/ https://geetlab.com/ Both of them get non-trivial amount of traffic.
- culi 4y ago
  that's cute. I also have https://elmlang.org/ https://elmlang.org/
steveads 4y ago
Funny, I read the link as 'Gmail' and didn't realize it was 'Gail' until entering the site.
guntherhermann 4y ago
Respect.
- 5amdotis 4y ago
  F
bitexploder 4y ago
Fun story. Back in day when bitflip domain research was released, I immediately offered it as a service to our customers. Register all available likely typos and bitflips. Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often. Run email, web, and other collectors. See what you get. We got so much legit data. The real good was owning those domains, but it was amazing to see how much compromising and sensitive data we collected for customers over the years. Widespread TLS helps, but it turns out they just want valid TLS… so for some of the hottest domains we would get certs for email, etc. fun stuff. You can still do this today, especially for newer companies.
- derefr 4y ago
  > Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often. Thought 1: is this because of the source/destination computer; or is this because network middleboxes, as embedded devices, are budget-optimized, and so are maybe running their CPUs at funny voltages, with low-quality RAM, etc; and DNS, as a UDP protocol, does little to prevent packets from mutating on the wire? Thought 2: Presumably this would imply that DNS results would get bit-flipped just as often as DNS queries, no? So you'd just as often be receiving A records for bit-flipped IPs. Which you can't really do much about.
  - uconnectlol 4y ago
    The requesting computer has a bit flip and requests the wrong domain. It even is not stopped by HTTPS depending on where the bit flip happens and how the software is written.
    - burnte 4y ago
      Is there any data to support the hypothesis that this happens often? I've never experienced it without being a human typo. I find it hard to believe in this day and age we have a single service that has high error rates no one notices.
      - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
LLcolD 4y ago
With all that traffic, what is the cost of the hosting?
brap 4y ago
Am I wrong to guess that this domain is worth more than a million dollars? Rejecting that kind of money for making a point is… I don’t know, but it’s definitely something. Edit: not just rejecting money, but defending it in court!
- bdlowery 4y ago
  It’s definitely dumb.
  - gghffguhvc 4y ago
    Selling out means the domain could be used to hurt people. I call that noble not dumb.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    I've rejected offers to buy my domains for small amounts of money. Every possession has some monetary value, and often times that value is more than anyone else would pay for it. I'd sell my domains for the right way-too-high price if someone actually wanted to pay that much for them, I'd also defend them in court if someone tried to steal them from me.
- wlonkly 4y ago
  What they successfully defended in court was a company called GAIL trying to get the domain without paying them for it.
dmd 4y ago
I have a two-character .org. I've never, in the 25 years I've owned it, gotten a non-scam offer for it. (Not that I'd sell for less than change-your-life money.)
- fragmede 4y ago
  Since you've never taken any of them up, how do you know they are scams? Anyway, a two letter domain could be worth a million dollars to somebody. What is your "change-your-life" amount of money?
  - dmd 4y ago
    Well, it's 3e.org - so number and letter, not letter letter, so probably worth less than that. I would definitely take a million dollars. I know they're scams because every single one I've ever gotten has eventually gotten to the point of "ok, send us X amount of money first to make this deal start happening".
johnebgd 4y ago
I owned a domain name similar to a popular email hosting service at one time and setup wildcard acceptance of all emails sent to it. The influx of typod emails was hilarious but overwhelming.
- thechao 4y ago
  I friend of mine has "common short personal name" at icloud.com, me.com, mac.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, proton, ... Importantly, one of those is bound to his iCloud account. During the holidays, he has an alternate "burner account", since his account can receive multiple reset requests per-minute for a couple of weeks. He estimates he gets 20000+ reset requests per year. According to him, it's just part of living his best life.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    My HN username is what I use for lots of other things, including for older email providers. You'd be surprised how many reset emails I get to that username at various webmails. It's not exactly John Smith.
    - thechao 4y ago
      I am a "J Smith" and my employer has many of us. Every quarter "we" (the group of specifically-first-named J-Smith's) are sent an email kindly reminding us to change our middle name in the corporate directory to "(Job Title)", to help people disambiguate us. The last time, there were three of us, so I tried to get the other "J Smith"s to change their names to "(Larry)", "(Moe)", and "(Curly)". No luck. There's a new crop of auxiliary "J Smith"s (I'm "J Smith Prime", in my mind), now, so I'm trying to work on them. One day ... one day.
      - kstrauser 4y ago
        Oh, I can only imagine how annoyed I'd be with that. That's how I'd end up as "K (Viceroy) Strauser" or such.
uconnectlol 4y ago
These questions are such typical American logic and why the internet sucks: There exists a thing and so something needs to be done about it. What if they use it to impersonate/phish/etc gmail? It has to be given to google! It happens that some four letter word is my brand, they can't just hold the domain, they have to give it to me! And the old adage "politics is not the solution" really does fix it: domain names are a misconception, use public key based addresses instead. Then there won't be typo squatting, bit squatting, anything. *queue barrage of typical "but what about the dumb user public key is too hard" stuff which all has already been answered ad infinitum* But you could put ads on it! It's really dumb how people set out to make a blog, then choose one of the free blogging offerings, and since the web is just a bunch of commercial crap, they of course get a commercial platform (instead of how things should be which is something like Freenet and no JS), and then the tutorial tells them how to put ads on and they think "sure why not". That was 10-20 years ago. Of course now if anyone wants to make a blog it was already for profit. This is why the internet is dying and it will be illegal to make a replacement: All these little American-dream people that think its their right to profit off mediocre content are gonna defend any case against the new internet such as "CP" and "copyright" (and any other fabricated "problem", they will just agree with it because they want the new internet dead). TL;DR the medium is broken and the new american digital worker will legally assault any alternatives
bravetraveler 4y ago
I wonder how much email they get from gmail typos
- pc86 4y ago
  Read the page, it's there.
  - bravetraveler 4y ago
    Ah drats -- the page view number distracted me It's interesting how much difficulty I have reading this page. I've been oddly conditioned to glitzy internet
jum4 4y ago
https://twitter.com/csch42 https://twitter.com/csch42 have a couple of IPv4 subnets similar to 192.168. https://ipinfo.io/AS20488 https://ipinfo.io/AS20488. In some podcasts he mentioned a lot of invalid requests.
status200 4y ago
Haha there are easter eggs as well: > Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg
- graypegg 4y ago
  > I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards. I beg to disagree, that’s a great cat!
anonu 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting I knew a guy who worked for a typosquatting firm. They owned many 1000s of domains and made millions of dollars in ads. At least thats what he told me. I wonder if anyone has more intel on this type of "business".
gardenhedge 4y ago
Wow, it's such a privilege to own a domain like that and not monetize it.
spixy 4y ago
> My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996. This is the strangest gift I ever saw.
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  Surely not that unusual to buy somebody a domain of their name? Admittedly quite a techie gift but I’m not sure I’d agree it’s quite as “out there” as you suggest!
- urbanmiffs 4y ago
  mail@gail.com would be such an awesome email address.
AviationAtom 4y ago
SEE: corp.com A great read. There's something to be said about being early to the party.
danbmil99 4y ago
Fun fact: In the 90's IBM produced a commercial where a young girl is creating her own website, www.duck.com, about ducks. Unfathomably, no one thought to check whether www.duck.com was an actual website, and what if any content might be there if people watching the commercial typed the domain name into their browser address bar. Turns out www.duck.com was our domain name at "The Duck Corporation", an early version of On2.com, later bought by Google. Google then gifted the domain to DuckDuckGo (try it!) Sort of a tech company version of Ancestry.com?
- spiznnx 4y ago
  I assume Google avoided a significant legal risk by gifting it to DDG edit: surprisingly, it used to point to Google Search https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duckduckgo-not-google/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duc...

Gail.com FAQ

926 points by weatherlight 4y ago

dagenix 4y ago

I don't know anything about this Brazilian Gail company, but I hope nobody uses them.

pelasaco 4y ago
Looking their website, looks like we can all complain at suelen@gail.com.br :))
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

codegladiator 4y ago

[flagged]

VoidWhisperer 4y ago
The website in this post is not listed there - it may have been useful to fully read the image you linked before posting it.
rerdavies 4y ago
But it does provide interest perspective on the cost of not owning THE domain name for their company. Perhaps they should rename the company. Disclaimer lest their be any mistake: I am totally charmed and bedazzled by the real gail.com, and hope that web archeologists of the future will still find gail.com running a hundred years from now. I just thought the post didn't deserve downvotes.

e61133e3 4y ago

"my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain." WOW

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

FlyingSnake 4y ago

Reading this felt like a trip through a portal into the nascent Internet in late 90s. I hope this never goes down.

raesene9 4y ago
My favourite 90's style website, that's still running, is http://www.armory.com/armory.html http://www.armory.com/armory.html , complete with FTP Index and user finger files.
- toyg 4y ago
  Blocked by our company filter as an "adult" resource, so you might have to add a NSFW warning there.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    There's nothing actually NSFW at the link, just your filter being overzealous
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Perhaps they are confusing it with the San Francisco Armory, a historic building the NIMBY neighbors blocked from being converted into housing so a porn company bought it instead and turned it into a production company instead.
      - andreareina 4y ago
        Not anymore I’m afraid. Sold in 2018 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Armory
        fragmede 4y ago
        They used to host their own servers there, but it went the way of the cloud.

samwillis 4y ago

See also http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/ Background here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comp...

Mordisquitos 4y ago
Another one that used to amuse me every time I mistook its domain for that of the magazine was http://www.theeconomist.com http://www.theeconomist.com, but I see it is now long gone. Here is an Archive link for reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20130119083638/http://www.theeconomist.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130119083638/http://www.theeco...
thrdbndndn 4y ago
http://steam.com/ http://steam.com/ used to be similar, but apparently they sold out later. I guess nothing is permanent. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161013203919/http://www.steam.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161013203919/http://www.steam.... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220730090724/http://www.steam.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220730090724/http://www.steam.... (The site is offline at the moment.)
- smcl 4y ago
  I think this is a good example of how if your desired username/domain is already taken, there’s usually a clever tweak you can do to get a similar one that works. In the case of Steam they went with “steampowered.com” instead. It makes me wonder why so many people go with like “firstname225” rather than spending a couple of minutes coming up with something little bit less silly-looking. In fact there was a funny thing for a while where a user iterated through all the @kevin(number) Twitter users every Friday: https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-is-getting-to-know-every-kevin-on-twitter https://www.gawker.com/5895578/weird-internets-how-one-man-i...
  - pcai 4y ago
    There are like 8 billion humans alive at any given moment though, so this trick doesn’t scale for usernames. “Just be a little creative” has been extremely unlikely to work for years now at say…gmail

gregjw 4y ago

Great sense of humour

charcircuit 4y ago

It must have been nice to have been alive in the early internet where barely any domains were taken. On the bright side domains have been less relevant since the rise of accessing sites via search engines and the move to mobile apps whose stores don't suffer from the squatting issues.

FlyingSnake 4y ago
Thanks to domain squatters, the internet businesses have to come up with weird nerdy names like shopify, YouTube, reddit, hooli etc.
- defrost 4y ago
  It's more than just domain squatting .. a business often wants a fresh name that uniquely searches to their business. Once upon a time search for songs by The The on youtube was a nightmare, that, at least, has improved.
mattlondon 4y ago
They were much more expensive in those days IIRC - today they are the cost of a couple of coffees, those days they were more like 25% the cost of a new computer... per year! It was also quite inaccessible in terms of purchasing - contracts, call our sales team etc. Things like GoDaddy were still either non-existent or very nascent in the mid-late 90s when I was just starting out as a early teen online. I had dreams as a youngster of owning my own domain name (just one!) and running my own site there... Now I don't even know how many domains I own!
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- in the early 90s you could easily get domains for free - there were many registrars who would give you free .com or .co.uk in return an iframe that advertised the registrar! - this all but disappeared after 1995 =( --
  - aembleton 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gourneau 4y ago

From the page source :)

kome 4y ago
it is not "unexciting by Internet standards". what the heck, it is gorgeous.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Yup, not even a SIC but some regal mane cat.
- julian_sark 4y ago
  I find it even technically outstanding. Is that some sort of natural Moire pattern on it's back? Spliced-in turkey genes? I find this cat oddly fascinating.
  - hoseja 4y ago
    It's fur waviness, I think.
  - petercooper 4y ago
    Maybe it had been sleeping in that box. The cardboard has a similarly distanced pattern.
sdrinf 4y ago
sooooo fluffy <3
walrus01 4y ago
Makes me wonder at how much bandwidth would be consumed by putting an image of the cat embedded in the page, with the volume of unique people typoing gmail.com on a daily basis. You probably wouldn't want it to be a 8.5MB PNG
deleted 4y ago

massimosgrelli 4y ago

It's so refreshing to see someone on the Internet not looking to make easy money showing off some lousy advertising. I would love to know more about the author; she's most likely interesting.

vincnetas 4y ago
it's he. website name is his wife's name.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  The author certainly claims to be Gail themselves; note the reference to “my husband”
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Ok i could be wrong. Was commenting after reading arbitration documents where respondent is referred as "The Respondent is Kevin Watson" https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d2006-0655.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200... "The Respondent registered the domain name <gail.com> on April 4, 1996, named after his wife’s given name, as a birthday present for his wife. " So yes, looks like was wrong. It's his wife's site (A gift)
    - avree 4y ago
      Yes, that's what the link that you're commenting on says. You didn't need to do any more research, especially not into arbitration documents.
SamuelAdams 4y ago
Yeah I like the pic of her cat.

gustavorg 4y ago

[flagged]

toyg 4y ago
People like you are why we can't have nice things.
082349872349872 4y ago
Had you been raised in a prison, that everything must be transactional? also, https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/ucha20/2002/ucha20.v015.i03/09332480.2002.10554810/production/09332480.2002.10554810.fp.png_v03 https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t...
- walrus01 4y ago
  Maybe the commenter was raised by Wall Street finance persons. Might not be that different.
truculent 4y ago
In fact, if they killed the goose, who knows how much gold there might be inside!

aledalgrande 4y ago

Anyone else wish there was an upvote button on the site? Or a guest book, 90s style?

Brajeshwar 4y ago

GAIL[1] is also the name of a publicly traded Indian Oil Company. Just like most pre-Internet companies that "comes online", they also went with gailonline.com just like how SBI went with sbionline.com. However, for SBI, I saw recently that they have become pretty Internet savvy -- they own the `.sbi` TLD. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL

davchana 4y ago
Yes, they do use bank.sbi & bankonline.sbi as redirect on some pages; for banking. For general information, they use sbi.co.in
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  Any idea how that can be done by entrepreneurs without having $180k in the bank? Is there a link one can read up on it? This looks like insert free real estate meme to me
  - FinnKuhn 4y ago
    It can't be done without paying between 150k and 300k, because that is simply the price for a TLD... a short how to register your own TLD can be found here: https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-domain-name-like-com-org-and-net-jhd https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-dom...
fmajid 4y ago
Also a bakery chain in the UK, https://gailsbread.co.uk/ https://gailsbread.co.uk/ (Gail.co.uk is squatted by a speculator).
- Jarmsy 4y ago
  I've always heard the bakery referred to as "Gail's"
causi 4y ago

lIl-IIIl 4y ago

From the domain takeover decision: "vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;" Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? It is obviously not unlikely that the someone has never heard of this obscure "manufacturer and distributor of ceramic products for architectural use" company.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> Are lawyers allowed to lie like that? This is a summary of claims. Lawyers are generally allowed to make claims based on incomplete information which they believe that they can show to the legally-required standard. Necessarily, in an adversarial proceeding where there is a material dispute of fact, some claims of one side or the other will be rejected.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
julian_sark 4y ago
I learned that lawyers are allowed to lie like there's no tomorrow, especially in civil cases pre-trial, in my jurisdiction. This was especially emotionally scarring when I hired a lawyer to rebuke civil claims of several thousand Euros for (supposed) downloading of some TV show episode, a practice which is either considered a national sport, or a major contributor to GNP in Germany (the copyright claims, not the downloading). The lawyer sent his usual spiel, his €300 template letter to the opposing council, which claimed that I'm a bumbling idiot who has no clue how to power up a PC, let alone plug in a network cable the right way 'round, and thus, can't possibly be guilty of any such shenanigans. I asked her whether a Linked In-profile that identifies me as a Sys Admin and IT Systems Architect might become a problem with this tale, but various lawyers assured me that this is a highly scripted industry (both the copyright claims and the defenses) and nobody cares. And the scripts are actually legal students sitting at home with access to a fax gateway.
- alex_suzuki 4y ago
  Fascinating. I live in Switzerland where downloading is legal but uploading is not. So basically if you downloaded a hypothetical torrent, and set upload bandwidth to zero, you‘re safe. I guess the lawyer could argue that I’m a bumbling idiot who forgot to turn off the upload facility…?

johnnyApplePRNG 4y ago

I made a small fortune off of a website called "utube" on google of all search engines back when youtube.com was taking off.

zone411 4y ago
Wow, that's one of the best misspellings you could have.

m00dy 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jore 4y ago

it reminds me of http://milk.com/faq/ http://milk.com/faq/

BonoboIO 4y ago
That took me by surprise :D

rerdavies 4y ago

Perhaps we should start a Go Fund Me to create a permanent endowment for gail.com so that it never goes away. This is a precious piece of internet history that deserves to be preserved for future generations.

walrus01 4y ago

See also , the long and complicated story of nissan.com and the guy who got sued for using his own family name for a domain

SilverBirch 4y ago

Can you imagine - hey hunny, you know that domain name that I bought you ages back? Yeah, well we're getting sued by a brazilian ceramics company...

anonymous344 4y ago

Can someone please clarify the USA legal basis Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark ?? I tought that the .com domains were 100% free of that bullshit..or how else is there so many domain shakals reserving thousands of domains..? related to their appeal: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d2006-0655.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2006/d200...

lfodofod 4y ago
>Can anyone sue you for owning a domain and say that it's their trademark Well duh? Anyone can sue you for anything and say anything.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
2Pacalypse- 4y ago
Not only they can sue you, but they can make your life a living hell if you choose to fight them back. See one of the most famous examples: http://nissan.com/ http://nissan.com/
- petesergeant 4y ago
  Given that there's an image on that page that simply links to an expired domain, I wonder if this might be a better source: https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-spent-8-years-fighting-the-car-company-with-1822815832 https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-spent-8-years-fighting-the-c...

tunnuz 4y ago

Why does the website get so many visits? Sorry for the dumb question I think I miss a reference here.

Armic 4y ago
It's a misspelling of gmail.com
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dark-star 4y ago
  Ah! That makes sense, thanks for clearing that up. I was wondering the same thing and had to search the comments for an explanation
DoreenMichele 4y ago
It seems likely that most visitors simply mistype gmail.com and end up visiting gail.com by mistake.
- tunnuz 4y ago
  I see. That makes sense. On a related note, I recall that when Gmail came out another domain (Gamil.com) had a funny banner on top saying:"Gamil is not Gmail, but we're glad you're here!".

anttiharju 4y ago

> "There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain" [...] > "My husband and I" [...] > "If you have a question not answered above, feel free to send it to: faq at gail period com" I wonder if the emails sent to the faq inbox would bounce haha

blensor 4y ago
Well one of the two email addresses could actually be faq
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Ensorceled 4y ago
It goes to her husband, Franklin Albrecht Quade.

fishbacon 4y ago

Sort of reminds me of the foo at https://www.bar.com/ https://www.bar.com/ Although Gail seems to be blessed with not receiving most of the email people are sending.

jaredsohn 4y ago

Sort of related: https://asdf.com/asdfemail.html https://asdf.com/asdfemail.html is still going strong. "You would never guess how many people use asdf@asdf.com (or some variant form) as a filler email address across the Internet. Opening up @asdf.com lets in hundreds of email messages a day pertaining to porn site registrations, real audio downloading, mailing lists dealing with Windows NT ... the list goes on and on! If you would really like to send us an email, you can do so here."

JackFr 4y ago
A person I know whose initials are actually ASDF complains that it’s always taken as a user name. (Although she does enjoy initialing things with just her first and last initial - AF)
scrollaway 4y ago
Oh their real email is absolutely brilliant :)
ploum 4y ago
This opened up my eyes. My pseudo is "ploum" and I have the ploum.net domain since 2006/2007. I’ve used the ploum@ploum.net adress for years but it became unbearable regarding spam. It took me this post to make the link that, in France, "ploum ploum" means "whatever random thing" and that surely people are filling "ploum@ploum" as a random address in every web form. Must be even worse for the ploum.com domain.
- lurker_jMckQT99 4y ago
  That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf". Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?
  - loginatnine 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

saagarjha 4y ago

I remember a while back "gamil.com" used to be a website that offered email services.

napolux 4y ago
gmail.it (an italian email provider) website is still active

FpUser 4y ago

Big like ;)

pachico 4y ago

Maybe because I don't understand modern CSS and part of the most new HTML markup, but I kinda enjoy reading this type of source code.

lurker_jMckQT99 4y ago
I ignore what standard the page follows but the code looks like it was generated or written by someone with little knowledge about CSS. Among other things, code is duplicated all over the place ; everything is globally centered, before every element being individually aligned to left. This is what it would look like with proper "boring old" html/css written back in the days https://jsfiddle.net/dgtvjn5x/ https://jsfiddle.net/dgtvjn5x/ (more readable and slightly lighter) For the sake of completeness: -it would require a more verbose doctype or none depending on when it was written ; - the "style" element would also require a "type" attribute until some point in time ; - "border: none" isn't required anymore, browsers have stopped adding border around images. PS. this is just a comment about how html/css can still be easy and straightforward these days. I do not mean to undermine the fact that the owner did the right thing with regard to standing for and protecting the domain (and promoting eff :)).

rwmj 4y ago

This reminds me of the old purple.com FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611055145/http://www.purple.com/faq.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020611055145/http://www.purple... Sadly I just checked the live site and it appears they did sell out in the end.

philshem 4y ago
https://www.isoldpurple.com/ https://www.isoldpurple.com/

pvsukale3 4y ago

My first thought after reading Gail.com was GAIL a government owned public sector company in India, it mostly deals in natural gas business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAIL

sonofaragorn 4y ago

Why keep the domain if you don't plan on monetizing it? What's the point?

executesorder66 4y ago
Why do you breathe without monetizing it? What's the point? Why do you take a dump without monetizing it? What's the point? Why do you listen to music, or watch a movie without monetizing it? What's the point? You must have a very sad life with the world view that you have.
mfcl 4y ago
You didn't get money for posting that comment and yet...
diegoperini 4y ago
> What's the point? Being a good example as a citizen of the internet by not exploiting people who mistype the address.
basscomm 4y ago
It turns out that sometimes people buy things or do things for reasons other than trying to figure out a way to squeeze money out of it.

Terretta 4y ago

As the site[^1] is unavailable for me, here's a cache from https://archive.vn/CQVsS https://archive.vn/CQVsS … Hello and welcome to the gail.com FAQ. Q: Why isn't there any content here? Can't you at least throw up a picture of your cat for the Internet to check out? A: Sorry, I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards. As for why there is very little content here, we wanted to keep the server's attack surface as small as possible to keep it safe. Q: Interested in selling gail.com? A: Sorry, no. Q: How did you manage to get gail.com? A: My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996. Q: How many times a day is this page visited? A: In 2020 this page received a total of 5,950,012 hits, which is an average of 16,257 per day. Looking at just unique hits, we received a total of 1,295,284, for an average of 3,539 unique hits per day. Occasionally, we get Twitter-bombed and may get several tens of thousands of visitors a day. As an example, on July 21st 2020 we received 109,316 hits. Q: Why is your website so popular? Are you one of those famous people that no one knows why they're famous? A: No, I'm not famous. It seems likely that most visitors simply mistype gmail.com and end up visiting gail.com by mistake. Q: I tried to send some photos to my girlfriend and typed gail.com instead of gmail.com in the address field. The photos were of a very personal nature. Can you please delete them? A: There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain, so it is extremely likely that your photos were rejected by my e-mail provider and tossed into the bit bucket. Another interesting gail.com factoid: my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain. Q: I think you're infringing on my trademark... A: If you consult with someone well versed in trademark law, they will tell you that you can't have an exclusive trademark on a common word or name. My husband and I successfully defended ourselves against an attempted domain takeover in 2006; see WIPO Case D2006-0655[^2] for more information. Q: Are you interested in monetizing gail.com? A: No, but thanks for asking. Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money? A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below. If you believe in a free Internet, please consider clicking on the link and donating to the EFF. If you have a question not answered above, feel free to send it to: faq at gail period com. Thanks for visiting. -Gail ___ 1. screenshot: https://archive.vn/CQVsS/b0c07d01ede677c3cc5f6d5212430d6a6beb2c2c/scr.png https://archive.vn/CQVsS/b0c07d01ede677c3cc5f6d5212430d6a6be... 2. archived case: https://archive.vn/8FaFU https://archive.vn/8FaFU

Amorymeltzer 4y ago

Previous discussions of note: -2021, 109 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283890 -2017, 160 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 I am always happy to see this reposted, though.

weatherlight 4y ago
An email i got from the moderators Hi weatherlight, The submission "Gail.com FAQ" that you posted to Hacker News in September 2019 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956204) looks good, but didn't get much attention. Would you care to repost it? You can do so using this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/repost?[REDACTED]. If you use the same account (weatherlight), title, and URL, the software will give the repost an upvote from the mods, and we'll put it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[REDACTED]), which will give it a random placement on HN's front page, usually within 24 hours (depending on how many stories are in the pool). If you have any questions, please let us know. If you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again. Thanks for posting good things to HN! Daniel (moderator)
- Amorymeltzer 4y ago
  Wasn’t suggesting you did anything wrong! Just pointing folks to other worthwhile discussions/comments.
  - weatherlight 4y ago
    Sorry! and no worries!
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  I've had a link that did way better in the second chance pool. It was really neat, I wouldn't have guessed it existed until I got the email. Definitely refreshing to have human moderation for things like this.

londons_explore 4y ago

The owner could at least have put a helpful link to gmail.com at the top. Would have saved millions of minor frustrations for millions of people. Or, since they seem not to be using the root of the domain for anything but a smug FAQ, just an HTTP 302 redirect.

palijer 4y ago
They are doing a ridiculously great thing with the position they found themselves in and of course people still have criticism about it. Gail if you do see this you are an absolute badass and a fantastic member of the Internet community, thanks for what you've done here.
OOPMan 4y ago
Cry more
uconnectlol 4y ago
American logic. Thing exists, something has to be done about it!

bmitc 4y ago

Everyone needs a little punk in their life, and this is punk. "I ain't gonna be part of this system. Maaaaaaannn." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYL5H46QnQ

xwowsersx 4y ago
"My dad's not a phone. Duhhhh!" LMAO

jest 4y ago

Yeah, I can sympathize... I've been using "jest" as my nickname since college years, like 25 years now. Now I'm bothered when someone upgrades @jest in their JavaScript project on GitHub or BitBucket

borbulon 4y ago
@TODO is a real person on github as well

Garbage 4y ago

This is awesome. I have following 2 domains, which are a popular misspellings :) 1. https://geethub.com/ https://geethub.com/ 2. https://geetlab.com/ https://geetlab.com/ Both of them get non-trivial amount of traffic.

culi 4y ago
that's cute. I also have https://elmlang.org/ https://elmlang.org/

steveads 4y ago

Funny, I read the link as 'Gmail' and didn't realize it was 'Gail' until entering the site.

guntherhermann 4y ago

Respect.

5amdotis 4y ago
F

bitexploder 4y ago

Fun story. Back in day when bitflip domain research was released, I immediately offered it as a service to our customers. Register all available likely typos and bitflips. Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often. Run email, web, and other collectors. See what you get. We got so much legit data. The real good was owning those domains, but it was amazing to see how much compromising and sensitive data we collected for customers over the years. Widespread TLS helps, but it turns out they just want valid TLS… so for some of the hottest domains we would get certs for email, etc. fun stuff. You can still do this today, especially for newer companies.

derefr 4y ago
> Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often. Thought 1: is this because of the source/destination computer; or is this because network middleboxes, as embedded devices, are budget-optimized, and so are maybe running their CPUs at funny voltages, with low-quality RAM, etc; and DNS, as a UDP protocol, does little to prevent packets from mutating on the wire? Thought 2: Presumably this would imply that DNS results would get bit-flipped just as often as DNS queries, no? So you'd just as often be receiving A records for bit-flipped IPs. Which you can't really do much about.
- uconnectlol 4y ago
  The requesting computer has a bit flip and requests the wrong domain. It even is not stopped by HTTPS depending on where the bit flip happens and how the software is written.
  - burnte 4y ago
    Is there any data to support the hypothesis that this happens often? I've never experienced it without being a human typo. I find it hard to believe in this day and age we have a single service that has high error rates no one notices.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

LLcolD 4y ago

With all that traffic, what is the cost of the hosting?

brap 4y ago

Am I wrong to guess that this domain is worth more than a million dollars? Rejecting that kind of money for making a point is… I don’t know, but it’s definitely something. Edit: not just rejecting money, but defending it in court!

bdlowery 4y ago
It’s definitely dumb.
- gghffguhvc 4y ago
  Selling out means the domain could be used to hurt people. I call that noble not dumb.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  I've rejected offers to buy my domains for small amounts of money. Every possession has some monetary value, and often times that value is more than anyone else would pay for it. I'd sell my domains for the right way-too-high price if someone actually wanted to pay that much for them, I'd also defend them in court if someone tried to steal them from me.
wlonkly 4y ago
What they successfully defended in court was a company called GAIL trying to get the domain without paying them for it.

dmd 4y ago

I have a two-character .org. I've never, in the 25 years I've owned it, gotten a non-scam offer for it. (Not that I'd sell for less than change-your-life money.)

fragmede 4y ago
Since you've never taken any of them up, how do you know they are scams? Anyway, a two letter domain could be worth a million dollars to somebody. What is your "change-your-life" amount of money?
- dmd 4y ago
  Well, it's 3e.org - so number and letter, not letter letter, so probably worth less than that. I would definitely take a million dollars. I know they're scams because every single one I've ever gotten has eventually gotten to the point of "ok, send us X amount of money first to make this deal start happening".

johnebgd 4y ago

I owned a domain name similar to a popular email hosting service at one time and setup wildcard acceptance of all emails sent to it. The influx of typod emails was hilarious but overwhelming.

thechao 4y ago
I friend of mine has "common short personal name" at icloud.com, me.com, mac.com, gmail.com, hotmail.com, proton, ... Importantly, one of those is bound to his iCloud account. During the holidays, he has an alternate "burner account", since his account can receive multiple reset requests per-minute for a couple of weeks. He estimates he gets 20000+ reset requests per year. According to him, it's just part of living his best life.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  My HN username is what I use for lots of other things, including for older email providers. You'd be surprised how many reset emails I get to that username at various webmails. It's not exactly John Smith.
  - thechao 4y ago
    I am a "J Smith" and my employer has many of us. Every quarter "we" (the group of specifically-first-named J-Smith's) are sent an email kindly reminding us to change our middle name in the corporate directory to "(Job Title)", to help people disambiguate us. The last time, there were three of us, so I tried to get the other "J Smith"s to change their names to "(Larry)", "(Moe)", and "(Curly)". No luck. There's a new crop of auxiliary "J Smith"s (I'm "J Smith Prime", in my mind), now, so I'm trying to work on them. One day ... one day.
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      Oh, I can only imagine how annoyed I'd be with that. That's how I'd end up as "K (Viceroy) Strauser" or such.

uconnectlol 4y ago

These questions are such typical American logic and why the internet sucks: There exists a thing and so something needs to be done about it. What if they use it to impersonate/phish/etc gmail? It has to be given to google! It happens that some four letter word is my brand, they can't just hold the domain, they have to give it to me! And the old adage "politics is not the solution" really does fix it: domain names are a misconception, use public key based addresses instead. Then there won't be typo squatting, bit squatting, anything. *queue barrage of typical "but what about the dumb user public key is too hard" stuff which all has already been answered ad infinitum* But you could put ads on it! It's really dumb how people set out to make a blog, then choose one of the free blogging offerings, and since the web is just a bunch of commercial crap, they of course get a commercial platform (instead of how things should be which is something like Freenet and no JS), and then the tutorial tells them how to put ads on and they think "sure why not". That was 10-20 years ago. Of course now if anyone wants to make a blog it was already for profit. This is why the internet is dying and it will be illegal to make a replacement: All these little American-dream people that think its their right to profit off mediocre content are gonna defend any case against the new internet such as "CP" and "copyright" (and any other fabricated "problem", they will just agree with it because they want the new internet dead). TL;DR the medium is broken and the new american digital worker will legally assault any alternatives

bravetraveler 4y ago

I wonder how much email they get from gmail typos

pc86 4y ago
Read the page, it's there.
- bravetraveler 4y ago
  Ah drats -- the page view number distracted me It's interesting how much difficulty I have reading this page. I've been oddly conditioned to glitzy internet

jum4 4y ago

https://twitter.com/csch42 https://twitter.com/csch42 have a couple of IPv4 subnets similar to 192.168. https://ipinfo.io/AS20488 https://ipinfo.io/AS20488. In some podcasts he mentioned a lot of invalid requests.

status200 4y ago

Haha there are easter eggs as well: > Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg

graypegg 4y ago
> I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards. I beg to disagree, that’s a great cat!

anonu 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting I knew a guy who worked for a typosquatting firm. They owned many 1000s of domains and made millions of dollars in ads. At least thats what he told me. I wonder if anyone has more intel on this type of "business".

gardenhedge 4y ago

Wow, it's such a privilege to own a domain like that and not monetize it.

spixy 4y ago

> My husband registered it as a birthday gift back in 1996. This is the strangest gift I ever saw.

urbandw311er 4y ago
Surely not that unusual to buy somebody a domain of their name? Admittedly quite a techie gift but I’m not sure I’d agree it’s quite as “out there” as you suggest!
urbanmiffs 4y ago
mail@gail.com would be such an awesome email address.

AviationAtom 4y ago

SEE: corp.com A great read. There's something to be said about being early to the party.

danbmil99 4y ago

Fun fact: In the 90's IBM produced a commercial where a young girl is creating her own website, www.duck.com, about ducks. Unfathomably, no one thought to check whether www.duck.com was an actual website, and what if any content might be there if people watching the commercial typed the domain name into their browser address bar. Turns out www.duck.com was our domain name at "The Duck Corporation", an early version of On2.com, later bought by Google. Google then gifted the domain to DuckDuckGo (try it!) Sort of a tech company version of Ancestry.com?

spiznnx 4y ago
I assume Google avoided a significant legal risk by gifting it to DDG edit: surprisingly, it used to point to Google Search https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duckduckgo-not-google/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/12/duck-com-now-points-to-duc...