Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tinyprojects.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 642 posts

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

#91

Post by tcgv »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #3

This is a fun hack, but there is no way I would get involved in providing any form of commercial email service for $1440 arr. I wouldn't do it for $1440 a _day_. Everything involved with email is pain. I wish you luck.

> Everything involved with email is pain

Agree. Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements you still need to spend a lot of time overseeing your system, and researching best practices and recommendations that directly affect domain and IP reputation, to avoid getting blacklisted.

Shameless plug: A while ago I decided to try build a home made SMPT Mail submission component for better understating what's going on under the hoods (and for "fun"), it was really though, and once I was able to send a DKIM verifyed e-mail to GMAIL servers I called it a day and moved on [1]

[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-...

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

#93

Post by shakow »

krsdcbl wrote: post #86
shakow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, concentration camp. Extermination camps were a subset of concentration camps. Doesn't mean that prisoners were expected to be well treated in a concentration camp (typically just well enough to be productive as a slave), but they were not directly sent to the gas chambers.

we don't make too much of a distinction in Germany or Austria in general usage of the word - while what you point out is technically correct, pretty much everybody here will understand "KZ" as "the whole of the nazi death machinery" and will definitely want to avoid to append it to their mail address in such a prominent way

Oh I'm all for simplifying the general language, the distinction doesn't really matter. However, I prefer to stick to the correct terms in writing :)

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

#94

Post by latexr »

> TLDR; (…) made $1000 in a week

> (…)

> I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.

> (…)

> Even though I still haven't made the money back on all the emoji domains I bought

So it took longer than a week and you haven’t made any money. If you’re having fun and things are going well by your metrics, why exaggerate (especially) in the TLDR?

It brought me back to a recent Indie Hackers post[1]:

> It took me a while to both learn how this stuff works and also that those posts can exaggerate or hide information to better sensationalize the post.

[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did...

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

#95

Post by matsemann »

pull_my_finger wrote: post #82
petercooper wrote: post #35

There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/ ) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan. I think the OP is OK as it appears the IP addresses of both the A and MX records are located within Kazakhstan, but something to be aware of if you think registering a .kz is a fun idea(…

This is something to keep in mind with all TLDs really. They're not all created equal and can be subject to rules specific to their operators. Have to do your homework before you buy that cute domain.

Which OP didn't do multiple times and got his purchased annulled. But hopefully in the future, heh.

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

#96

Post by ludamad »

folli wrote: post #51
shakow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i.e. Nazi Death Camp

I think words here do matter. Concentration camp isn't taken as a euphemism, per se, but Nazi-specific jargon. This weakens its ability to invoke sympathy for other high-density, high-mortality regions

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

#97

Post by LeonM »

This service should come with a big fat warning that the emoji email addresses should never be used for anything remotely serious.

Running an email service is not, by any means, a 'tiny project'. I would never pay, nor rely on an e-mail service that is effectively a one-men side project.

I just took a quick check on the 'mailbox' domain (I can't paste emoji here on HN). There seems to be no DMARC, no MTA-STS and no TLS-reporting set up for these domains. The SPF record allows a single /48 (65k) IPv6 block of addresses to send email on behalf of the domain. The MX does not seem to support TLS. The SPF record seems to be added at the '@' domain, so it is returned on every query, even where it is not supposed to be returned, so you can be sure DKIM will fail (you did set up DKIM, did you?). Just to name a few issues.

But even if implemented perfectly, there are a lot of 'enterprise' email 'solutions' out there that are not even close to implementing even the most basic of RFCs. Do not expect them to support punycode. Do not expect your emoji email to de deliverable to any of these services.

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

#98

Post by abdullahkhalids »

prepend wrote: 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…

Is this some sort of abuse protection, where people use gmail as free storage?

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

#99

Post by unnouinceput »

OK, so somebody sends an email to one of those cute emoji addresses he has the service implemented for. Now the recipient hits reply - where does it go? From article I understood he did some forward service in order to avoid direct emoji domain blocking. So the recipient will hit reply and at the "Send to" field will be the email address of the normal domain, not the emoji one. How do you overcome this?

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

#100

Post by wohfab »

kuon wrote: post #19
sixhobbits wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh HN doesn't support emojis - that is g@ .kz or g@

I think you need the .kz, if you don't, I can officially say that I am out of the tech game and need to go grow potatoes.

You need a TLD but IIRC, the second level is not required. So you could have something like `http://google`, which I think, Google actually had at some point in the past. Cannot however find anything related to this anymore.
Post reply on HN