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I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
- gnabgib 2y agoEnormous discussion at the time (2021)[0](1683 points, 626 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422799
- ktosobcy 2y agoI wonder how many users does he have now :-)
- sour-taste 2y agoOn the front page he says: 2k addresses registered If you take that as a live counter of the number of subscribers that's 2k a year, and pretty good! If you take that lifetime registrations that's not so good. Also assuming that that copy is accurate.
- aprilnya 2y ago2000 * $10 = $20,000, over 3 years that’s $6,666 a year. Doesn’t seem that bad
- boomboomsubban 2y agoI find it amusing thar about a sixth of the comments are on how couples should handle their finances. Nobody could have guessed that.
- MikePlacid 2y agoHow to resist commenting on "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?" ? ))
- carstenhag 2y agoAlso found a comment from myself warning of using this anywhere near Germany (tldr kz stands for concentration camp). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26423117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26423117
- geek_at 2y ago> never use abbrevations like SS, NS, AH, HH, HJ in Germany Very true, also for Austria. When I was in the military and we got our Steyr AUG A1 we had to know the serial number by heart so we could find our gun when mixed up. We also had to report our serial number when asked by instructors. Mine started with "HJ18" which was by random chance but always wondered why these wouldn't be taken out before production because of the obvious nazi code
- groestl 2y agoAs a German speaker, first association when reading the title of this post. "Uuuuh, that does not fly in Germany."
- xyst 2y ago[flagged]
- aidomi 2y agoDoes anyone know what happened to TinyProjects? I looked forwards to reading his updates and it looks like he stopped a while ago…
- quantumwoke 2y agoLooks like he focused on promptbase when that became successful. There was a daily blog for promptbase at some point that had some promising revenue numbers.
- qingcharles 2y agoThis was my last response in May 2023 when I reached out to him, hoping he was OK! *** Hi Charles! All good here. I have been heads down building a new project - hence the lack of posts recently. Thanks for reaching out! Ben ***
- earslap 2y agoI would not trust Kazakhstan to honor the TLD registrations if this took off and made some noise. Reminds me of Libya taking ownership of all those trendy .ly domains claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations to operate them. Still a fun idea taken quite far!
- freeone3000 2y ago>claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations to operate them It being a CCTLD, this is a true claim. At a basic level, these tlds belong to the country, and that country sets the rules. Libya reclaiming from ICANN was a jerk move but their claims are absolutely right. (Most cctlds already have this requirement.)
- dc396 2y agoLibya didn't reclaim anything from ICANN -- ICANN didn't have anything of Libya's.
- ransom1538 2y ago"claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations" I always smile when bosses want everything to be GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Why are we clicking on cookie popups? We think the EU is smarter than the PII laws from Cameroon? Elitism I say. My websites follow strict guidelines set by proper Constitution of Cameroon doctrines. Every fourth visit to my site we dump all contents in html form (obviously).
- askvictor 2y ago> GDPR compliant. I am not sure why these laws are more important than the laws from the Chilean Navy. Purely market size. Europe is a large market. Same reason that just about every product is labelled with 'known to the state of California to cause cancer' - California is a large market.
- 2y ago
- ramijames 2y agoThis was a fun read.
- zer00eyz 2y ago>> Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven. I turns out their mailbox.ws domain doesn't have SPF or good DKIM records. Might be part of the problem why google chucks it. Email is a shit show. I feel like getting emails out reliably is akin to black magic now. Without the right incantations your never going to know what happened or why.
- scoot 2y agoEven Google struggles to apply these correctly 100% of the time: google.com TOTAL SPF ALIGNED DKIM ALIGNED 209.85.167.49 3 100% 0% 209.85.218.47 3 100% 100% 209.85.167.43 2 100% 50% 209.85.208.44 2 100% 100% 26 more IPs 28 75% 92.8%
- nurple 2y agoIf you setup DMARC reporting, the big providers will send you a daily delivery report for emails from your domain to theirs. Great for tuning deliverability, and for catching ruffians attempting to use your domain. You're right though, email is still a shit show, it's particularly annoying that they've made so many over-complicated auth schemes based on centralized and insecure-as-a-rule root tech(DNS), and never phase any out. When it's easier to configure postfix than domain identity, you know something is wrong.
- bibalumi 2y ago[dead]
- Joker_vD 2y agoWait, aren't emojis explicitly prohibited from being used in IDNA? Or do the implementers just not bother to read the "IDNA Rules and Derived Property Values" table and simply allow anything that's a correct punycode?
- zinekeller 2y agoIn summary, countries trump IDNA (and as you notice, it's all ccTLDs - ICANN will stop you if you tried this with a gTLD).
- m3047 2y agoKazakhstan and DNS. Always always my personal reminder that OWASP applies to all applications, and to always sanitize inputs. DAMHIK!
- bolasanibk 2y agoDon’t ask me how I know.
- cool_sound_ed 2y agoThis is really a fun idea and nicely written post
- yosito 2y agoI find it a little disingenuous that the author keeps dropping the TLD and describing the emails as cool@<poo>, when the TLD is still part of the email address. Interesting experiment, anyway. I'm surprised that it worked well enough to get a functioning email service working with it. A lot of systems must assume that an email address or domain name wouldn't include emojis.
- theideaofcoffee 2y agoSame, switching between <emoji>.cctld. and bare <emoji>. made me question the author's understanding about DNS as a whole, those two are very much different things! Then again, the average tiktok viewer wouldn't, I assume, care too much about needing to tack on .kz to an email as long as there is an emoji in the address. But yes, it's an amusing (ab)use of punycode, but still fun in spirit.
- lysium 2y agoI was wondering how „bob@[rocket]“ works… Thank you for clarifying.
- 1-6 2y agoIt seems like a great way to fend off spam
- spencersolberg 2y agoIt would be cool if they took the https://omg.lol https://omg.lol approach and let you host a website/page at bob..kz if you purchase bob@.kz
- davidw 2y agoThis sounds like a subplot of a Neal Stephenson story from back in the day.
- jameshart 2y agoAn NS version of this story would somehow involve the protagonist needing to travel to Kazakhstan, undertaking a multiple-day journey in a convoy of trucks across some mountains, to secure a meeting with an officious local bureaucrat who turns out to be bribable with in-game currency from a Chinese gacha game he’s obsessed with.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoThat sounds very much like my experience in Kazakhstan
- eskibars 2y agoI bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it. Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well. I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out. Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead
- AndyMcConachie 2y agoAccording to the IETF standard for IDNA it is invalid. https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-advisory-committee-ssac-reports/sac-095-en.pdf https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/security-and-stability-ad... https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-emojis-domain-names-13feb19-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/idn-emojis-domai...
- aprilnya 2y agogTLDs have to follow that, ccTLDs not necessarily (is what I got from comments on the original discussion of this blog post.) Even if emoji was invalid, unicode in general is valid in domain names, and should be converted to punycode. Local domains exist too. It’s not the email client’s job to decide whether a domain is valid, it’s DNS’.
- fragmede 2y agoHN's emoji stripper is intentional. some are supported, eg; ↖↙↗↘ but others are not, so we're reduced to using things like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to communicate
- pferde 2y agoI don't feel like emoji add anything substantial to a textual conversation, it's mostly useless fluff. I don't miss it on HN, so I disagree with your use of "reduced" here. :)
- marc 2y agoI discovered emoji .to domains ~7 years ago and put up a site listing all the available ones [1] Within a few days almost all of them sold and made a couple grand in affiliate commissions. I wrote about it here: https://marc.io/emoji-domains https://marc.io/emoji-domains Email forwarding is also a clever use! Nice to get that recurring revenue. [1] https://xn--f28h.to/ https://xn--f28h.to/
- lifestyleguru 2y agoThis stopped feeling like fun the moment one person can hoard entire country's emoji set of domains... and I feel guilty for hoarding half a dozen of domains...
- rkagerer 2y agoI bought 40 squeaker balls for my dog, those were also fun.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoBut you didn’t have a blog post AND a LinkedIn announcement
- xandrius 2y agoI'm 3 years late (better late than never I guess) but this was a brilliant read and idea: simple, neat and no bloat. Love it!
- pards 2y agoI thought this was a cool idea so I tried to add a mailbox with an emoji username to my protonmail account - no bueno. Invalid username. Boo!
- qingcharles 2y agoSo there's two parts to having an emoji email address. You can do just the domain (supported some places) or go full emoji and have an emoji username too. You should never go full emoji. It is supported in far less places than the domain alone is.
- msephton 2y agoThis was fun. I feel they missed a truck not calling the service Emailji, which swaps just one syllable.
- pantalaimon 2y agoHow does that even work from a legal perspective? Do you have to create a business at some point/file taxes?