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I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

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Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#41

This address will not work for obvious historic reasons in Germany.

For us who don't have the historic context (nor understand the reference to past concentration camps), what do you mean it won't work?

KZ is the shorthand for Konzentrationslager, i.e. concentration camp.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting Unicode characters is too much?

Supporting Unicode characters comes with a set of complications that you may want to address, as, for instance the infamous HTML-parsing with regex rant shows. As soon as you start trying to address those, the simple problem suddenly grows quite a lot in scope.

Notice that HN already does support unicode: α β γ é ö 本

It actively filters out a small part of it, mostly emojis (which I think that it is a good thing to do).

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#43
post #6

> I setup an email forwarder to route all email sent to .ws to my regular email address. >Eagerly I typed ben@.ws into the "to" field of gmail and hit send. > The email never hit my inbox. It was lost forever in cyberspace. I think this was just caused by Gmail now working when a message is sent and received at the same account. It just disappears. [0] It’s really annoying, it’s not part of a spec, it’s just gmail. I…

Can confirm. This bit me recently until I thought to use another account for testing.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#44
post #13

Cool project! Like others noted mail can be such a pain though, you'll need a lot of customers to make it worth keeping it running after the first year. Note: In the FAQ it says the price is $5/yr, but it seems to be $9.99 now.

I co-founded Nameplanet. Back in '99 we registered ca. 60,000 domains to provide vanity e-mail addresses (not at full price - we negotiated steep bulk discounts for several TLDs). In the end we moved on to create the dot-name TLD, and sold the e-mail service. It took the purchaser less than a year to recoup a multi-million purchase price by converting a tiny proportion of the userbase to paid accounts.

So, yes, you'll need a lot of users, but there's been a market for paid vanity e-mail addresses for a very long time, and this seems to be an untapped niche... I doubt he'll get rich off it, but there's a good chance he can grow it to a size that makes it very worthwhile.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think it's about age. I'm also considered old (in the technology sphere at least) and I don't really enjoy the "emoji" humor either, but I don't get mad about seeing them. Let others have their fun, no need to get angry about things you cannot control.

I think I'm old in that I was thinking how would I write this emoji email address on paper. Also I can just imagine the joys of form validation when you add an emoji into the email address. On the other hand I doubt most email harvesting bots crawling the web would be configured to recognize an emoji email.

You shouldn't use any vanity email address as your only address, unless you want your online life lost to inbound GMail and outbound corporate filters. So, if there's a situation where you need to write it down, use the 'serious' address.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#46
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting Unicode characters comes with a set of complications that you may want to address, as, for instance the infamous HTML-parsing with regex rant shows. As soon as you start trying to address those, the simple problem suddenly grows quite a lot in scope.

Notice that HN already does support unicode: α β γ é ö 本 It actively filters out a small part of it, mostly emojis (which I think that it is a good thing to do).

Is HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql which is famously not full utf8mb4?

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#47
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us who don't have the historic context (nor understand the reference to past concentration camps), what do you mean it won't work?

KZ is the shorthand for Konzentrationslager, i.e. concentration camp.

Ok, and .kz is the ccTLD for Kazakhstan. You think people can't realize the difference?

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#48
post #33

This address will not work for obvious historic reasons in Germany.

For the same reason, I hope he doesn't support this emoji https://emojipedia.org/star-of-david/ - or else the service would attract customers he might not want to be associated with...

Eh, you don't want the service to attract Jews or what? Star of David is a symbol within the Jewish community. What you are referring to is probably the "Yellow badge" that was used by Nazis for identifying Jews. Two very different things.

Let's not make all Jewish symbols Nazi-related, we have enough of that already.

Also, some soldiers wore the Star of David as a symbol of defiance against antisemitism. So if you see someone wearing that symbol (or using a domain with that symbol), assume they are Jews/supportive of Jews, not that they are Nazis.

Re: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

#50

Maybe the whole covid thing lowered my happiness-level standards, but I find this charming. Also I would be scared to receive actual money from people for something as out of my control as email. I hope the author doesn't get hit by a wave of "my emoji emails are not being delivered to @commercial-behemoth or @government-branch and I've made my emoji adress my main one and it's all your fault" a few months down the l…

The emoji part is charming.

The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!

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