331–340 of 642 posts
Basically it's a long and technical shaggy dog story. He started with an insane premise (emoji domain name ?!), added enough detail (The night of 150 emojis) to strain even a willing suspension of disbelief yet still without breaking it, and then ended with an anti-climactical (because it is a shaggy dog story even if true) $1440/year ARR.
Bravo.
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.
The other day I setup a postfix server in my VPS, which I intend to use with mailman3 to have some mailing lists. It was a bit of a pain to set up, but nothing too difficult. The worst part was setting up DKIM and SPF. The thing is, I constantly hear people saying that managing an email server is something extremely difficult and that requires constant attention. Am I doing something foolish by attempting to do this…
Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).
Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)
Long story short, it's a mess :)
On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.
I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.
Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!
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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 doma…
My favourite is when the validation rejects anything with the service name in the email. I wonder whether it's to prevent somebody registering @ as a joke, or a really bad attempt at preventing @mailinator.
So, it is easier to blacklist it altogether.
When we can’t even discuss current tech events here on HN because HN filters out the characters needed, maybe it’s time for HN to rethink its emoji filtering policy.
These still work: ⬛ ⌛ ⏳ ⌚ ⏰ ⏱ ⏲ ♟⌨♨♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ 🃏 🀄⬆ ↗ ↘ ⬇ ↙ ⬅ ↖ ↕ ↔ ↩ ↪ ⤴ ⤵ ▶ ⏩ ⏭ ⏯ ◀ ⏪ ⏮ ⏫ ⏬ ⏸ ⏹ ⏺ ⏏‼ ⁉〰⭕〽© ® ™ #⃣ ⃣ 0⃣ 1⃣ 2⃣ 3⃣ 4⃣ 5⃣ 6⃣ 7⃣ 8⃣ 9⃣ 🅰 🆎 🅱 🆑 🆒 🆓 ℹ 🆔 Ⓜ 🆕 🆖 🅾 🆗 🅿 🆘 🆙 🆚 🈁 🈂 🈷 🈶 🈯 🉐 🈹 🈚 🈲 🉑 🈸 🈴 🈳 ㊗ ㊙ 🈺 🈵 ⬛ ⬜ ◼ ◻ ◾ ◽ ▪ ▫ # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
About a year ago, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22741817) someone here used what they thought was the Apple logo symbol, but some fonts (which follow the ConScript (unofficial) Unicode Registry for private use characters) might show a KLINGON MUMMIFICATION GLYPH instead!
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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.
For other readers: emoji keyboard is ctrl + cmd + space on macOS.
> Mailoji was not a proper business yet, so there was no way I could publish my ad. I always have shelf businesses registered and available for this. Its an art and almost passtime for me to sit down with bankers and open accounts for these things soon after registration and give the bare minimum information “It’s a tech company” “no, there isn’t a website its 2021 it just uses telegram and wechat to get customers” (…
Don't you pay an annual fee for these?
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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.
That UI is hilarious (for a given value of hilarious) in the sense that the search for emojis uses whichever input language you're using, even if your UI language is something else. So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.
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It amazes me how people on HN can handwave away these huge concerns. Have you met human beings? The users just sees "email" and thinks it's exactly like gmail except with a funky emoji in it. It's only a matter of time before someone tries to pay their taxes with this.
You know what breaks, in human beings' experiences? Everything. All the time. So the holier-than-thou, thou-shall-not-deploy-less-than-perfect perspective is pretty irrelevant. This is a side project. That did something neat. The author should be commended, not lambasted for not rebuilding Gmail on their own. And God knows the Internet would be a better place with a little more weirdness again.
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That UI is hilarious (for a given value of hilarious) in the sense that the search for emojis uses whichever input language you're using, even if your UI language is something else. So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.
The default Android keyboard has similar behaviour. I was learning Spanish so I switched my phone to Spanish then back in English at some point later. Yet the change never propagated to the keyboard for some reason so my emojis are still in Spanish.