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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

#521

Post by cmeacham98 »

amenod wrote: post #52
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.

Note that OP is actually generating loss at this point - 300 domains at $8 equals $2400, which is in itself bigger than the income. Can you maybe share what problems OP might have? I have toyed with an idea of starting something similar and would love to know what I'm getting into.

I've attempting something similar before so here's a non-exhaustive list of problems from the top of my head:

1. Getting to send email, at all: lots of hosting providers blacklist outgoing port 25 TCP specifically to prevent random people getting their IPs put on a spam blacklist

2. Getting your IPs de-blacklisted: unless you get really lucky whatever IP you _start_ with has a good chance of already being on several blacklists, and some make it stupidly hard to get your IP off the list even if the ban was from 5 years ago by whoever had the IP back then

3. To even have a chance of your emails being deliverable you have to understand and configure reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC (and probably a few other I've forgotten or which have been invented since I tried this)

4. Even after you get this far, major providers like gmail are likely to send your email straight to /dev/null because you're a new provider with no reputation

5. If (or more accurately when) somebody manages to abuse your service to send a ton of spam you'll get re-blacklisted and have to fix that all over again and implement/fix spam filters to stop people like this (this will probably happen several times as you constantly attempt to battle spammers)

6. You're going to want some sort of incoming spam filter, because people don't really like spam in their inbox, and most existing open source and/or free solutions are mediocre at best

7. If you use a weird TLD (i.e. not .com/.org/.net/similar) random online business will not allow your email or not send to you properly, and your customers will blame you despite you being able to do almost nothing about it

8. Even if you use a "standard" TLD to get past 7 some particularly bad actors will use a email domain _whitelist_, so only gmail and friends are allowed, and again your users will blame you

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

#522

Post by zepearl »

styfle wrote: post #503
zepearl wrote: post #501

I think that I'm missing something. General question: can such emoji domain names be used as well for normal URLs for webbrowsers? (I guess "yes", but then why does the article focus that much only on email-addresses?) If yes, does anybody have any example? (I'm testing a web-crawler => I would like to test it against such emoji-domains...)

Yes, but it will likely show up as punycode in the browser address bar, for example http://xn--938h.to And sadly, you can't post emoji on hackernews comments :(

Thank you (http://xn--938h.to/ seems to perform a redirect? I see "meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://webcoliving.com/japanese.html'" /").

I was anyway hoping for that (I'm happy as it doesn't screw up the address bar with some kind of emoji that look like real chars).

Anyway, if somebody has examples of any (even slightly) (technically) hardcore domain names then please post => thaaank you :)

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

#523

Post by [deleted] »

scubbo wrote: post #456
School-Cotton wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. In fact, RFC 5321 specifically forbids you from interpreting the local part of an address in any way. > the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

See your sibling comment for another perspective! (EDIT: which, to be clear, doesn't invalidate your point. Though it's worth considering, I guess, whether "only assigned semantics by the host specified in the domain" prevents user-tracking systems from calling "foo+bar@gmail.com" the same user as "foo@gmail.com". After all - if they're being interpreted "as" user IDs, rather than as emails, does that really breach t…

[deleted]

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

#524

Post by School-Cotton »

scubbo wrote: post #456
School-Cotton wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. In fact, RFC 5321 specifically forbids you from interpreting the local part of an address in any way. > the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

See your sibling comment for another perspective! (EDIT: which, to be clear, doesn't invalidate your point. Though it's worth considering, I guess, whether "only assigned semantics by the host specified in the domain" prevents user-tracking systems from calling "foo+bar@gmail.com" the same user as "foo@gmail.com". After all - if they're being interpreted "as" user IDs, rather than as emails, does that really breach t…

It's not really a different perspective. Sieve, which the sibling comment's RFC extends, is a mail-filtering script language for end-user inboxes. So it's perfectly reasonable for a user on foo.com, who knows that foo.com supports the `+` syntax, to write a Sieve script directing mail to "username+blah@foo.com" to a particular inbox.

In fact, that RFC specifically calls out that interpreting the `+` on non-local addresses is likely wrong:

> NOTE: Because the encoding of detailed addresses are site and/or implementation specific, using the subaddress extension on foreign addresses (such as the envelope "from" address or originator header fields) may lead to inconsistent or incorrect results.

EDIT to address your second point:

> After all - if they're being interpreted "as" user IDs, rather than as emails, does that really breach the RFC?

Well, technically no, the RFC is about SMTP so if you're not writing an SMTP implementation, you're not breaching it.

But RFCs aren't the law, so whether you're technically breaching it isn't really what's relevant. What _is_ relevant is that a system that treats foo+bar@quux.com the same as foo@quux.com is making assumptions about how email works that contradict the RFCs that define how email works. Whether that's a useful thing to do in practice is an engineering decision with tradeoffs. E.g., it's probably fine to assume it for a whitelisted set of domains where you know it to be true, like gmail.

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

#525

Post by swader999 »

rhythmofrest wrote: post #318
simias wrote: post #289

I'm genuinely impressed by the author's willingness to come up with such a silly idea, go through with it, implement a completely barebones website that won't even let you send emails from the addresses and starts selling subscriptions for $10/year. I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely impressed. If it were me I'd spend 2 years mulling about it and never actually do it because I'd be worried about not managing to make…

I'll take "things you can do when you're single"... can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"

It was kinda like that in 2013 when I suggested btc mining to my wife to cover the costs of the electric heat in our new house. And here we still are...

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

#526

Post by warent »

satellite2 wrote: post #465
konschubert wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still have personal budgets, even if they are very small. Heck, when things are tight, even having 10 Euro personal "fun money" a month for each partner can give a bit of freedom.

Freedom 10EUR

That goes a lot further in eastern europe than you might think!

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

#527

Post by Jonovono »

lupire wrote: post #479
Jonovono wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish, but that is now my goal to find that number! https://howlett.sexy/ its over on here if you want to see ;p

Your web page font is unreadably thin.

Thanks!

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

#528

Post by belval »

vxNsr wrote: post #495
belval wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue it that a lot of .com are taken so for the sake of a personal email address it is not ideal. The person that owns "belval.com" literally registered it before I was born so I settled for "belval.org", "belval.me", "belv.al" but only the first one is accepted by most company.

My last name ends in al but the domain is taken. The .com one is taken by a guy who’s using it to showcase his Holocaust family tree (oddly enough his son had a run in with my sis a while back). I tried reaching out to him to see if he was interested in taking like .org but he’s not :( so I got .me

I offered $1k (there's nothing on belval.com) and belval.org to the owner of belval.com, he just replied to say "never contact me again" as if I was with the mob or something. It was a weird experience.

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

#529

Post by magneticnorth »

asciimov wrote: post #490
Grakel wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand this, but I see it all the time. People should have shared money, and they should also have their own money. Does my wife like it when I buy myself expensive toys? I have no idea, it's irrelevant unless I stop covering the bills.

It's for family budgeting and trust. We generally ask/inform if we are going to spend more than $100 on any given project/item. This helps both of us realize if it's a need or want. That way if I mention I'm going to get a new video game, I'll be stopped if its the third one in a month. Or if she wants new luggage, is it because it is needed or is it desired because it's a new color that is available. You might make…

Our solution was to sit down and decide what amount and cadence of "fun money" we can safely allocate to ourselves, and we can save or spend that individually.

In our case we have very different spending habits - I love to get a fairly regular coffee-shop latte & croissant, or fancy restaurant meals with friends, and similar things that savings gurus tell you will prevent you from ever retiring (my spouse's point of view).

My partner likes to spend way too much (imo) on "toys" once or twice a year.

We spent way too much time being obnoxiously judgemental at each other before we did the math and discovered each spending pattern works out almost exactly the same in aggregate over a year or two. Now we just set that aside and there's no judging because we know that the amount spent averages out to under what we decided was reasonable.

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

#530

Post by pimlottc »

capableweb wrote: post #47
shakow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And .tv is Tuvalu, and .me is Montenegro, and .io is the British Indian Ocean Territory. But those domain names are popular largely because they have other meanings.
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