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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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like how many UK businesses and individuals had to give up their .eu domain name after leaving the EU.

I'm really surprised they didn't do the logical thing and grandfather all existing domains in when the UK left the EU. It seems like the policy was simply designed to frustrate as many people as possible for no real gain for the EU.

The EU continues to control .eu because it is available only to EU citizens. Nothing changed.

Your surprise exactly reflects the typical beliefs of a Brexit supporter, you thought the idea is you get to keep all the benefits you had before, and also you get rid of any downsides you didn't like, and somehow it's the EU's job to help you achieve this after you leave.

That didn't make any sense in 2016, and it still didn't make any sense in 2020, and so unsurprisingly here we are in 2021 and it isn't what happened. "We told you so" is boring but it's true. We told you so.

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

#162
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?

I don’t think so as email forwarding is pretty basic and it’s blocked even for tiny messages.

I suspect it was just some stupid developer pre-optimizing, thinking they were clever and not thinking through use cases. “Every email from me to me will skip external routing and just get flagged in storage; therefore, any email from and to me and not through that process must be fraud and we’ll just save the user from that and black hole it.”

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

#163
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail already is free storage, AFAIK it shares you data quota with you Google drive account. Most likely this is a 'mail-loop' prevention. If you setup two accounts that forward to each other, then emails will be stuck in an infinite loop. Inject a couple of multi-megabyte emails into that loop and you can take down the entire service. This is effectively a DOS attack.

It could also be an implementation detail. Mail messages have a unique identifier. Gmail might just concatenate the mail identifier with your account identifier to use it as a primary key to store your email in the "mails" bigtable. If you send email to yourself, when it comes to put the mail into the mails bigtable, the result will be "primary key already exists, cannot insert"

Maybe similar to this, but it works if my message stays in gmail when I send from my gmail straight to my gmail.

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

#164
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is entirely true. But in practice, this is for fun, no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important. But it's great to have an emoji email to give to medium when they ask for it? Isn't that great.

> no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important I disagree. We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this. But any non-technical person who sees 'get a next-gen email addresses' being advertised for 9,99/year will expect more. A lot more. Do not underestimate how naive and demanding consumers can be.

>We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this

UWU US HACKER NEWS USERS ARE SO INTELLIGENT!!!

Worse than reddit.

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

#165
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you asked 100 people in Germany(!) what "KZ" stands for the result would be something like 95 say "Konzentrationslager", 5 say "I don't know" and 0 "ISO code for Kazakhstan".

Indeed. But if you ask the whole world (as we're on the internet), 1% might recognize it as "Konzentrationslager", 2% might recognize it as Kazakhstan and the rest have no idea.

So for general internet usage, I think it's fine. We're not modelling the internet after German customs after all.

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

#166
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Associating the star of david with the .kz TLD (concentration camp) is not a good idea.

Unless you're a avid Jew living in Kazakhstan of course.

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

#167

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(…

> 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. Any country TLD is a potential risk that most western "entrepreneurs" blissfully ignore. Just a month ago notion.so had troubles with it's domain because .so belongs to Somalia, and So…

Some extensions require presence in the EU, eg .eu & .it [0]

IOW not available to citizens or companies in Europe, but not member of the EU eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina

[0] Who can register a .it domain? https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/faq

The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use an email address that ends in .io and the amount of people that still ask me ".io? are you sure that's correct?" never ceases to amaze me.

Hell, booking.com will even tell you that "your address looks incorrect" (sometimes, I got it once out of two bookings made on a single day), if you dare to use your own domain .com. They used to nag me about "ohh, are you sure it's not tadzik_@gmail.com"? And I'm not sure what's worse.

You got nothing on my firstname@lastname.technology email.

Can't register at half the sites, and if you can register sometimes you can't log in. Banana Republic, in particular, lets me log in through one login flow, but not the one that's integrated into the checkout process.

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

#169
post #112

The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly inter…

I use an email address that ends in .io and the amount of people that still ask me ".io? are you sure that's correct?" never ceases to amaze me.

Yeah. Try using wildcard email accounts together with a uncommon TLD, and people ask me if I work at their place all the time.

Last time I booked a car at Hertz:

> Me: My email is hertz@capableweb.work

> Agent: Woah, you work here at Hertz? That's so cool

> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?

So many email validations fail with a uncommon gTLD that I started switching everything to a .com domain instead. Sometimes I even get rejected when my email address contains the company name... "Sorry, your email seems invalid" is all I get, but changing one letter of the company name makes it pass the validation...

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

#170
post #152
post #112

The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly inter…

By the way, we already have an "emoji button" on our keyboards: on Windows, it's the Win+. keystroke. Try it if your Windows 10 is updated enough.

Win+Period or Win+Semicolon
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