16 ms·

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

1683 points by tinyprojects 6y ago

anoncow 6y ago
Ben Stokes is also a very popular English cricketer.
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
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.
- scandox 6y ago
  > Everything involved with email is pain. Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.
  - ludamad 6y ago
    What would you have done differently?
    - 177tcca 6y ago
      Probably not run an email server. =[
- amenod 6y ago
  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.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    But in one year he'll have almost doubled his investment unless subscriptions all cancel within the year (highly unlikely with things like domain names / email addresses / etc.)
  - texasbigdata 6y ago
    That was before HN though! You have any idea how many eggplant emoji handles he’s sold since?
  - cmeacham98 6y ago
    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
- manquer 6y ago
  Depends. If he is actually running only a forwarder , it is much easier than running an full fledged service with mailboxes and other support.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    Running a 'forwarder' still means that you have manage the MTAs, and all the infrastructure around it. It's still a lot of work.
- tcgv 6y ago
  > 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-hood https://thomasvilhena.com/2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-...
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    > Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements ...there's no guarantee anyone else will. Currently I am getting moaned at because the "Money Stuff" newsletter is not arriving - which appears to be because Bloomberg have flubbed their DKIM. What am I supposed to do about that, eh?
- dieortin 6y ago
  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 by myself? Should I just pay for a big email provider? (They’re quite expensive for the resources my organization has) I’ve tried to set everything up as securely as possible, but I’m not an expert in email either. I’m just afraid I might be creating big trouble for myself in the future.
  - TimBurr 6y ago
    I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing). 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!
deleted 6y ago
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sshagent 6y ago
I think i might have realised I've become old, when the very idea of an emoji domain causes me anger. sigh
- capableweb 6y ago
  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.
  - robotbikes 6y ago
    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.
    - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
      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.
    - ttt0 6y ago
      I'm not old and I hate it. I don't even know how to insert an emoji on a computer.
  - sshagent 6y ago
    Yeah thats what i meant. I should see the fun as the primary part of this. I guess we're just one step away from meme email addresses.
- ziml77 6y ago
  But it's reasonable. Domains are already surprisingly confusing to people. Emoji in a domain piles on top of that when people have no clue that's possible. Plus it makes it more difficult to communicate the address verbally and it can be hard or even impossible to enter the address in some systems.
prepend 6y ago
> 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 ran into this because I have some forwarders too and if I send an email from gmail that goes out, when my external mail server sends it back to gmail it never gets there. It’s not deleted, it’s not marked as spam, it just doesn’t exist and there’s no record. I suspect if author had sent from another account it would work fine. [0] https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-forwarding-gmail/ https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-...
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Can confirm. This bit me recently until I thought to use another account for testing.
- mns 6y ago
  Exchange also does this, if you are part of a group, send an email to that group, you will never get it. We ran into it when one of our systems were sending an alert for a failed action to a group, but it was sending it on behalf of the person that tried to do that action and eventually failed. Everyone in the group was getting the email, except the original person.
  - prepend 6y ago
    That’s not so bad, but it’s not as bad as gmail. Exchange will return a message that comes back to the mailbox via a forward. Also, I think, Exchange is doing this because the list is on server and it’s part of Exchange’s deduping. If I send to the list and foo and foo is in the list, foo gets one email, not two. For example, I have foo@gmail.com, foo@outlook.com, foo@prepend.com. I set up foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@gmail.com. If I send a message from bar@gmail.com to foo@prepend.com, it comes through as expected. If I send the same message from foo@gmail.com, I never get it. Prepend.com’s mail server has a record of sending it to gmail.com, but my gmail account has no evidence of it anywhere. If I change foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@outlook.com, I don’t have this problem.
deleted 6y ago
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rplnt 6y ago
Cool, but I also wish this wouldn't exist.
williesleg 6y ago
Hooray?
sixhobbits 6y ago
I'm confused by the post about if I can buy g@ or only g@.kz - the post seems to suggest the former but I don't understand how that would work
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  oh HN doesn't support emojis - that is g@<unicorn-emoji>.kz or g@<unicorn-emoji>
  - kuon 6y ago
    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.
    - wohfab 6y ago
      You need a TLD but IIRC, the second level is not required. So you could have something like `http://google http://google`, which I think, Google actually had at some point in the past. Cannot however find anything related to this anymore.
      - sofixa 6y ago
        The .ai TLD has an A record, so http://ai/ http://ai/ works.
        kuon 6y ago
        Yes, this I understand. But not the other way around.
      - Biganon 6y ago
        I wrote a post about that: https://www.simonjunod.ch/projets/webtld/ https://www.simonjunod.ch/projets/webtld/ It's in French, but it's easy to understand the gist of it
  - 6y ago
ylere 6y ago
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.
- vidarh 6y ago
  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.
Aldipower 6y ago
This address will not work for obvious historic reasons in Germany.
- carstenhag 6y ago
  For anyone outside the german-speaking countres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps -- In german: Konzentrationslager, abbreviated with KZ. Similarly, never use abbrevations like SS, NS, AH, HH, HJ in Germany. Also, some of these are forbidden on our license plates.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    Are Buddhists and Hinduists allowed to use Swastika in Germany?
    - joeberon 6y ago
      Yes
    - qayxc 6y ago
      Yes they are. The Swastika is a religious symbol, the Hakenkreuz is not.
    - bsenftner 6y ago
      The German swastika is a mirror reflection of the religious icon, btw.
      - qwerty456127 6y ago
        No, it isn't. Dharmaic traditions use both directions.
        dheera 6y ago
        This is correct.
quickthrower2 6y ago
I really enjoyed the rabbit hole and sort of wished you made more money. I think you need FOMO to get this to take off. My idea would be to join clubhouse app (I can invite you if you need) and tell people about your story as it’s entertaining, get some influencers there to have an emoji email on their bio as a contact - which is a perfect fit as most bios have a lot of emojis and clubhouse has no DM feature but people like to get I touch. The idea is a nice mix of utility and craze. Better than those NFTs in my opinion. Plus I’m tempted to get one :) I’ll sleep on it though. Good luck!
- path411 6y ago
  I bet since this hacker news post he's made much more money.
kuu 6y ago
Really fun idea and interesting to see how it grew and grew :)
teddyh 6y ago
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.
- tester34 6y ago
  I think you may expect way too much from such a simple website
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    Supporting Unicode characters is too much?
    - scbrg 6y ago
      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.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        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).
        xPaw 6y ago
        Is HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql which is famously not full utf8mb4?
        capableweb 6y ago
        Hah, you think HN would use something mainstream like mysql?! I don't blame you. But HN is 100% custom software, and built with it's own programming language as well, Arc (on Racket). AFAIK, HN still runs on files-as-a-db. You could check out the source here: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  This is not that
Toutouxc 6y ago
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 line.
- Tepix 6y ago
  The emoji part is charming. The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!
  - maybevain 6y ago
    Personal preferences aside, the original article [0] on the Netflix and Facebook domains gives context which is no less charming, at least on ethical grounds. Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want." [0] https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  On the mailoji website it says you cannot currently send emails using your mailoji address. It's just for forwarding mail to your main inbox at the moment
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  The clever part about this is they don't deal with deliverability at all. This is only for incoming email.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Borat would be proud of you.
EugeneOZ 6y ago
> and yes, most form validations hate them. Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously resistant to following the specifications.
- flal_ 6y ago
  I used to have an email address at university along the line of "f.d'a@university.edu". I couldn't make use of it, because no-one believed it was a valid address even though it is allowed by the goddam RFC. turns out you could put a lot of funky stuff in the local part of an email, spaces ? yep. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5
  - sybercecurity 6y ago
    always relevant: "So you think you can validate email addresses": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxX81WmXjPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxX81WmXjPg Which is also why proposals to put email certs (S/MIME, OpenPGP) in the DNS led to hashing the local part, as DNS only allows ASCII and is case insensitive.
  - Biganon 6y ago
    Pretty stupid of your university to give you this address. Sure it's technically valid, but they know perfectly well it will be refused almost everywhere, and even when not explicitly refused, it will cause bugs. Being technically correct is useless if you're the only one doing it.
    - flal_ 6y ago
      Yes, it was I guess that was a bug I'm the student name to email generator. They quickly provided me a convenient alias but I was still able to receive mail at the address with the apostrophe, and it was cool. Having an apostrophe in my name still triggers a surprising numbers of bugs to this day...
petercooper 6y ago
There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/ 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(!) :-)
- pull_my_finger 6y ago
  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.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Like how many UK businesses and individuals had to give up their .eu domain name after leaving the EU.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      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.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        It could be a fraud prevention and accidental legal misrepresentation defense mechanism to take away the .eu domains from the UK. If you go to a .eu domain and buy something you would expect not to be subject to import duties etc.
      - tialaramex 6y ago
        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.
johnbatch 6y ago
I’m surprised it doesn’t support emoji in the name field. No <emoji>@<emoji>.kz
- Tepix 6y ago
  When email addresses were standardized, unicode wasn't around. For domains and hostnames we have punycode which maps unicode characters onto the ASCII charset, which is why it works. This does not apply to the user portion of the email address. Emoji as part of the display name should work, i.e. "Emoji" <user@emoji.kz>
  - layer8 6y ago
    RFC 6531 adds support for internationalized local-parts. Support in actual software may be lacking though.
    - ganzsz 6y ago
      I sometimes run into sites that won't even allow a + in the name part of an email address. And yes, I use gmail and the + functionality extensively.
      - layer8 6y ago
        In the early days I used "/" in local parts, which is syntactically valid. That turned out to be a bad idea, as some mail software was mapping local-parts to file names...
monstersinF 6y ago
Fun idea! But It’s too bad that Kazakhstan’s decision to MITM all HTTPS traffic makes this a nonstarter for actual use https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-intercepting-all-https-traffic/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-i...
- Tepix 6y ago
  That seems completely unrelated to an email service, especially if most of its users are outside of Kazakhstan.
  - qmarchi 6y ago
    .kz registrants, like many ccTLDs, are required to host core services within the borders of Kazakhstan.
- scaladev 6y ago
  They don't MITM anything. There were a few ridiculously incompetent failed attempts. There will undoubtedly be more, but HTTPS works fine at the moment. Just wanted to clarify this.
- dbrgn 6y ago
  With the state of unicode support in the legacy systems that make up of our e-mail infrastructure, I doubt any emoji domain will be ready for any actual use, where you rely on e-mails being actually delivered to you.
amenod 6y ago
I have a domain that would be great for an e-mail forwarding service, but I have second throughts about starting it... Is there someone here with experience in this area? What should the OP be most scared of?
- Tepix 6y ago
  Abuse by spammers and criminals, DDoS and hacking attempts for starters. Lots of spam complaints to handle manually. Also payments using stolen credit cards.
- kureikain 6y ago
  I run an email forwarding service call https://hanami.run https://hanami.run It's fun because you gotta learn alot about email. Especially when you play with DKIM, ARC chain you found yourself reading through RFC. Or when I discover weird issue like this: https://hanami.run/blog/posts/the-quirks-of-gmail-ui/ https://hanami.run/blog/posts/the-quirks-of-gmail-ui/ I think the OP mail one is for fun, people who registered an emoji email properly expect some fun aspect and OK with email being lost. In practice, the most scared thing is having your IP on blacklist. Very quickly people will complain when they lost email or too many email goes to spam or just rejected completely. Due to the nature of email forwarding, people usually own the domain, so they use random address for many random website(coupon, download free ebooks, shitty newsletter...) so it attract a large amount of spammer I have to constantly deal with now. When gmail return a 550 in their SMTP server(550 mean they block/rate limiting), I got a bit worry at first but I learnt to live with it nowsaday
matsemann 6y ago
Why so fixating on buying google.<tld>, netflix.<tld>, facebook.<tld> etc? The fact that one of those might be available does not make them valuable at all.
- macksd 6y ago
  You can resell it to another speculator. Which I don't like, but isn't so different from a cryptocurrency that is never actually used for trade.
kureikain 6y ago
My hat off to tinyprojects. This is a very cool project and I'm so happy to see they wrote this at the end: > But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun. Apparently I run https://hanami.run https://hanami.run an email forwarding service and I also say that https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future > At the same time, we like to make email more fun. We are commited to build tools that help you process email easily. Your banks don’t have an API to help you build a real-time activity tracker? Just use email. Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site. I'm thinking about comment for a static site. Simply send an email to a magic address to comment? Similar to news letter? Anyone like this idea
- holistio 6y ago
  Do you have some protection filters on for https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz? I cautiously opened the site and was basically prepared to be greeted with (child) pornography. How do you prevent that?
  - kureikain 6y ago
    I rely on email spam filterting, which seems effectively filter out them. No sophisicated filtering yet. I didn't advertise it anywhere outside of Hacker News and not many people know about it yet.
- tzfld 6y ago
  >https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz Nice but I see some risks there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)
  - kureikain 6y ago
    wow, thanks so much for that information. I'll have it migrate to some different domain.
weinzierl 6y ago
This is a great fun project but a risky business idea. Only 13 registrars allow emoji now and one could also say only 13 still allow them. It is well possible that they will stop supporting emoji, like other registrars did in the past. How do I know? Many years ago happen to own the single unicode character domain name that was coincidentally very similar to the logo of my website. At some point the registrar informed me that my domain will not be allowed by the NICs rules anymore and they had to cancel it. Made me a bit sad, but it ever was only a novelty anyways.
Gys 6y ago
> Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks. Appreciate the honesty of a few weeks. The number of great looking projects on HN that mention 'build last weekend' are hard to belief.
latexr 6y ago
> 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-it-take-2-days-2-months-or-2-years-88b91d8e1c https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did...
LeonM 6y ago
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.
- shp0ngle 6y ago
  This service doesn’t support even sending, just receiving. So I don’t think there is DKIM even considered.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    Or SPF for that matter.
    - toxik 6y ago
      It should have an SPF record saying nobody can send as that domain.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    It says send support is 'coming soon' on the website, so expectations are already set for those paying for this service.
  - motoboi 6y ago
    It needs DKIM so other people cannot send e-mail pretending to be you.
unnouinceput 6y ago
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?
- had-rien 6y ago
  I've purchased an email to try it (not for serious stuff of course). So for now you cannot send an email, only receive one. When someone sends an email to your emoji account then it s forwarded to an actual email address of your choice. The mail will have the following signature at the end : Sent via Mailoji. Don't reply to this email. Reply to the sender email address below From Sender Name: sender@email.com to your Mailoji you@emoji.kz ---------
bikson 6y ago
I'm still don't know why emoji's are a thing.
- krapp 6y ago
  People like to communicate their emotions through cute pictograms, it's not difficult to understand.
  - Biganon 6y ago
    I find it fascinating that some people fail to understand that. It's so obvious. Emojis are hugely useful to convey intent and emotion. But they're relatively new, so I suppose they're automatically stupid, get off my lawn etc etc
- macksd 6y ago
  Emotional context is easily lost over text. Adding an emoji at the end helps makes it more explicit when you're employing irony, sarcasm, or when expressing a genuine emotion like sadness.
mbreese 6y ago
And now, I own yet another domain name. At least this one is so that my kid can have a very unique email address. That’s some high quality tween cred.
jefe_ 6y ago
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 interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'
- gottavomment 6y ago
  This is art. I worked as a cashier for a couple years, and this feels like a fever dream about those days.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Sample size dichotomy. From a customer's perspective, this is the way everyone does things. (Sample size: themselves) From a cashier's perspective, this weirdo is a few standard deviations outside the mean. (Sample size: 1,000+ customers)
- duiker101 6y ago
  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.
blfr 6y ago
The real scoop is Netflix.soy. Excellent. https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
throwaway_kufu 6y ago
I started registering some emoji domains on Ethereum Name Service, not to be a total squatter I’m building static sites and deploying them on IPFS...it’s fun but expensive so hopefully NFT dWeb/web3 domains turn out to have cryptoart value. The use case mostly seems to be a novelty wallet address but I’m going full blown GeoCities with building decentralized websites. I even built a NFT search engine deployed on IPFS at geocities.eth The emoji domains are cool in theory but there are issues to say the least. Many services asking for your domain name don’t recognize the emoji character (google programmable search engine, fleek, github, etc...). I did manage to “hack” the system a little and register a single character emoji domain ( .eth) because it renders as 3 characters.
ape4 6y ago
Why can't you pick an emoji as username
- maybevain 6y ago
  The local part (i.e. "username") of an email is restricted to a limited set of valid characters. https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html
jkhdigital 6y ago
> complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji" Almost spit out my coffee laughing at this
marckohlbrugge 6y ago
Emoji domains are a lot of fun for sure. Shameless plug: A few years ago I discovered them for the first time and made https://.to https://.to which listed all available single-emoji domains for the .to extension. Within a few days hundreds of emoji domains were registered and very few were left. I think I netted the registrar 10,000s of $$$ in days. (I got a nice commission myself as well of course). Edit: okay so HN doesn't like emoji domains – here's a blog post that goes into more detail with the actual URL: https://marc.io/emoji-domains https://marc.io/emoji-domains
vbezhenar 6y ago
Please note that all kz domains must be served by servers located inside Kazakhstan.
rwmj 6y ago
I thought IETF had banned emoji domain names after the unicode snowman was registered? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572)
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  I did too... I’m assuming some registrars just haven’t properly dealt with this case.
  - setBoolean 6y ago
    ICANN banned emoji gTLDs. But there are ccTLD registries that don't fall under ICANN regulations.
marban 6y ago
Thanks for the reminder, I now own a double rainbow domain.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  It’s a bummer the username can’t be an emoji, too. <money bag>@<rainbow><rainbow>.kz would be an awesome email address.
plumeria 6y ago
Ironically, you cannot use emojis for the username (e.g. :crab:@:crab: )
- aaron_oxenrider 6y ago
  I found this strange too. I wonder if there is some other technical reason or just somehow didn't think of this in the validation?
rendall 6y ago
I went to [lightbulb-emoji].kz and it transformed to http://xn--ds8h.kz http://xn--ds8h.kz
- nancy99 6y ago
  That is to prevent phishing with latin characters that look identical to normal ones.
- Biganon 6y ago
  That's punycode. Your browser is configured to display everything as ascii, using the punycode "transcoding". It's a good practice, see the binance hack that used binance.com with a tiny diacritic on one of the letters, that lead to a huge phishing attack.
had-rien 6y ago
I like the idea of having an email dedicated to joke and not serious stuff so I rushed to register one. Kind of disappointed that I cannot send an email now, it takes away a lot of fun until I can especially since I've learned about this after paying :/
ghoomketu 6y ago
This guy seems crazy about registering weird domain names. netflix.soy, google(.hebrew).. good to see him making his money back and kudos for doing the jokes so thouroghly. I too have such crazy stupid ideas all the time, but it's one thing to think about it and another to actually finish it and start marketing it with videos on producthunt and tiktok.
totetsu 6y ago
Emojis are "fun" in the same way hallmark melody greeting cards are "fun"
Thoughtful 6y ago
Emojis in subject lines can sometimes cause issues with ticketing systems, so I can only imagine how ticketing systems will like emojis as domains.
sitzkrieg 6y ago
the author may like to know Cyrillic doesn't automatically mean Russian
- simias 6y ago
  The website is in Russian though. The author probably knew that because he had to use some online translation tool to go through the purchase process. Fun fact: the Kazakh government decided to replace Cyrillic with Latin for the Kazakh language. Apparently the process is supposed to end in 2025, but I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment.
  - sitzkrieg 6y ago
    ah wow neat
  - scaladev 6y ago
    >I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment Not much. Most publications and websites are still using the old alphabet, including the most important government portal which is used by pretty much everybody: https://egov.kz/cms/kk https://egov.kz/cms/kk I rarely see it on anything more substantial than ad banners and propaganda posters (like "don't litter" and "vote for our beloved leader").
altgans 6y ago
Why stop at emojis? Why use the aubergine emoji when you can instead use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs[1]? There is even an anti-aubergine [2]! In my opinion there is an untapped marked here. And it also is a "full circle" moment - i bet in the next millennium emojis will also be counted as hieroglyphs. 1: https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/ https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/ 2: https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/ https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/
- _jal 6y ago
  Heavy use of emoji is a great way to make me stop reading. I don't parse images super well - icon buttons in applications slow me down a lot, too. Mentally trying to reconstruct meaning from icons might be a fun recreation, but it is a high-load, annoying waste of time for me when we just need to convey some info. Use your words, or I'm likely to check out at some point.
- hedora 6y ago
  Try explaining how to type “Bob@naughty-croquet-hieroglyph.kz” in mixed company.
- runnr_az 6y ago
  I built a site for that: https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com
  - cptwunderlich 6y ago
    Uff, φ is all sold out :smh:
  - sabertoothed 6y ago
    On my machine (Ubuntu, Chrome), every special character is literally just a rectangle. Makes the website look a bit less interesting that way ;) I am not techie enough to be able to fix the view at my end.
goldcd 6y ago
Just wanted to say I enjoyed that story - whimsical little tech project, written up in an entertaining and informative manner. Not that I dislike more serious stories, but nice to have a mix.
CyanDeparture 6y ago
I will never use this, but I'm delighted it exsits.
aequitas 6y ago
Why even bother with registering emoji domains? Just allow people to register bob.<emoji>@mailoji.com. TikTok users probably wouldn't care where the emoji was in the email address. Most non technical people don't even understand email addresses (you work here too? is the most common question I get when I tell people my email is <theircompanyname>@mydomain.com). Only internet nerds really care that the emoji is in the domain name.
ada1981 6y ago
Missed opportunity here is to have made this free with a "powered by emojimail" link. Give people 1 month free for every friend they refer and after 3 months charge them for the year.
silentsea90 6y ago
This is so cool, wish I were as good an engineer as you! I am sadly trapped in my backend big tech world and haven't spent time nor effort to dig myself out of that hole
rntksi 6y ago
Can you have emoji@emoji.emoji email address? So your email address would just be 5 "characters" including the @ and the dot
cyberlab 6y ago
Just be careful with ccTLDs. Read more about the .IO debacle a few years back: https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/ https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-... Also recently, Notion had issues with their .SO TLD More info here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-schedule-app-dns-technical https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-sche... > but some speculated that it may have to do with Notion’s web address: notion.so. The “so” suffix is the domain for the country of Somalia, and a deleted tweet from Notion asked if anyone knew people in Somalia.
- finiteseries 6y ago
  A decade ago, Artsy had to move away from art.sy when Syria was sanctioned by the US. The .ly’s and Libya were around that time too, I’m not sure if any of them were affected though.
ing33k 6y ago
Borat would say "very nice"
simias 6y ago
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 it work correctly.
- rhythmofrest 6y ago
  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?"
  - tenacious_tuna 6y ago
    I've come to believe that there's a certain amount of insanity required to be a great entrepreneur. Like Jobs or Musk--their personal qualities aside, they both had arguably legitimately insane visions that they refused to let people talk them out of. The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).
    - hilbertseries 6y ago
      Steve Job didn’t invent the smartphone and Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car, they did both make those things cool. Steve Jobs also had a treatable form of pancreatic cancer and died from it, because he refused traditional medicine. You can point to countless inventions and advances in humanity that are not due to crazy asshole geniuses. What happens to people is that the better you are at something, the more willing they are to forgive your flaws. This allows those flaws to grow and grow, to the point where you’re accusing random people that insult you of being pedophiles. But these flaws are not a requisite part of being driven and not giving up.
dheera 6y ago
This seems ripe for phishing, similar to @аррӏе.com (which isn't @apple.com -- go ahead and check) and someone actually did this once. [0] There are lots of emojis that are hard to tell apart from each other. [0] https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/ https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/
vmception 6y ago
> 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” (remember: the bank doesn't actually care about their anti-money laundering statutes either, they care about you giving them a reason to care, which is very different.)
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  >I always have shelf businesses registered and available for this. Don't you pay an annual fee for these?
tener 6y ago
Huh. Neat idea, but why does emoji needs to be a part of the domain? <rocket>@emojimail.com would work just fine? Plus, you can have mail aliases that way and combine multiple emoji too. <rocket><moon>@emojimail.com could be equivalent to rocket.moon@emojimail.com for compatibility purposes.
- chias 6y ago
  IIRC the email spec requires all characters to be ASCII. Technically your email address isn't bob@[mailbox].kz, it's bob@xn--h78h.kz which your browser and possibly some mail clients will render as bob@[mailbox].kz. But xn--h78h@emojimail.com will always just display as xn--h78h@emojimail.com. For the domain part, browsers and email providers have collectively agreed to render domains of the form xn-[stuff]-[stuff].[tld] according to the Punycode specification, but no such rendering exists for the username.
  - tener 6y ago
    The ASCII only restriction feels very artificial. I wouldn't be surprised to find some work in progress to lift it. Edit: yep, there is clearly work in that area and not even that recent. Of course support is spotty depending on actual software in use. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/760150/can-an-email-address-contain-international-non-english-characters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/760150/can-an-email-addr...
acvny 6y ago
This promotional video is epic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c
CalChris 6y ago
That was freaking awesome. 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tobib 6y ago
I love how it says everywhere to "buy" a TLD when it's really renting or leasing. It's not like it's a one time payment and then you own it.
- tobib 6y ago
  Is this wrong? Am I misunderstanding anything? I'm genuinely curious.
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
ICANN SSAC Advisory on the Use of Emoji in Domain Names https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf A good document outlining many of the issues with using Emoji in domain names.
easyKL 6y ago
TLD .cf supports emoji and can be bought for free (up to 12 months). Now good luck finding a reseller that processes the purchase of an emoji domain name.....
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I just bought (not with the free deal) a one-letter emoji .cf domain name. €9 at Freenom.com. (It would probably have been better to use the free deal for a few months first.)
closeparen 6y ago
This is awesome. But why make the recipient copy and paste the reply address? Can't you use the Reply-To header?
tijuco2 6y ago
"The next step was to convince someone else to buy an emoji email address. TikTok seemed like a good place to start given its demographic" that's accurate haha
blackearl 6y ago
This is hilarious. I just tested it as a subdomain. O365 flatout won't let me send to emoji addresses, at least through the regular browser UI. Gmail is happy to oblige though
Paradigm2020 6y ago
Read the full article and watched your amazing trailer :) but loved the last line and fully agreed: "But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun." Right on man !!! Applause. Added to personal wish list when I'm not sinking all my money in domain names & startup :).
Dries007 6y ago
I bought <beer>@<computer>.kz but it doesn't work, the forwarder doesn't have SMTPUTF8 support sadly. The QA engineer in my couldn't not try that one :)
e-clinton 6y ago
Great job. Consider offering a more expensive option like $50 free forever. Also $10/year feels cheap for such a fun project.... try a random number like $16, I’m sure you’d have similar conversion. Kudos
mfkp 6y ago
I'd be more inclined to use it if he doubled up on the domains, for example also providing "clownemoji.kz" as well as (actual clown emoji).kz (so if I were to tell someone my email is "mfkp at clown emoji dot kz", they could either use the clown emoji, or spell it out.
heleninboodler 6y ago
Neat. Suggestion: it would be useful to have a text search so I can see if you have a particular emoji without having to squint at the whole list.
dmitrygr 6y ago
> It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up. And this is why they are "all taken" on all other domains...
kalipso 6y ago
I would recommend advertising that at https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere
- roozbeh18 6y ago
  hah
- simias 6y ago
  I was actually just thinking that he should probably register the [diamond][hands].kk domain, there's got to be some demand for it given how much it gets spammed over there.
  - magneticnorth 6y ago
    Diamond hands appears to be taken everywhere listed by the mainstream emoji registration sites, sadly. It was a good idea
  - rileytg 6y ago
    way ahead of you... OP was right, it was a pain to use that registrar.
  - diamond_hands 6y ago
    https://xn--tr8hi8e.kz/ https://xn--tr8hi8e.kz/
    - high_byte 6y ago
      that was quick
    - nerdb4itwascool 6y ago
      OP sort of deserves this. His little commercial there shows the diamond hands emoji but he never registered it
    - 6y ago
beiller 6y ago
My God! I've been waiting for this since the day the architects told me "only ASCII characters are allowed in the email database field"
koboll 6y ago
I'm kinda disappointed that I can't register an emoji handle. No diamond at hands dot kz for me, I suppose.
Zelphyr 6y ago
This was such a fun read. It inspired me to buy http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/ http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/ Edit 1: TIL Hacker News doesn't support emoji. lol Edit 2: Yeah, I know; that's a cow, not a bull. Don't yuck my yum!
leokennis 6y ago
Registered an e-mail address. I’ll probably only use it to mildly impress some people and it’s entirely possible it will stop working within the year. Then again, it’s $9.99...
felixfbecker 6y ago
How does this work? Is it converted to some super ugly punycode, or do domains actually support full Unicode?
simonbarker87 6y ago
This is delightful, enjoy your massive headache running this thing
zacharycohn 6y ago
You're a monster. This was a delightful read.
opinologo 6y ago
"I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need." Kudos to the author for such a fun project
sideproject 6y ago
For anyone who is going down the impulse-buying of many domains (me!) and then finding yourself having too many unused domains, I created a little tool to make use of those unused domains (and maybe even monetize them) https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co
siltpotato 6y ago
I've been seeing more of this title recently and can't suss out the pattern. Is this about it? "I x'd (something ridiculous) [and (more ridiculous)]"
zepearl 6y ago
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...)
- styfle 6y ago
  Yes, but it will likely show up as punycode in the browser address bar, for example http://xn--938h.to http://xn--938h.to And sadly, you can't post emoji on hackernews comments :(
  - zepearl 6y ago
    Thank you (http://xn--938h.to/ http://xn--938h.to/ seems to perform a redirect? I see "meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://webcoliving.com/japanese.html 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 :)
stilisstuk 6y ago
What is the rfc regarding usernames? Can emojis only work on the main domain? Can't we have [emoji]@[emoji].kx?
krick 6y ago
When I see something like that, I feel genuinely ashamed I didn't do it myself yet. This is so stupid and impractical (seriously, imagine having an email address no email form validator even accepts), that it must be successful. So, congrats, OP.
alhamallwh 6y ago
International women's clothing and shoes CLICK HERE http://raghadstayl.com/ http://raghadstayl.com/
shroom 6y ago
Great read and really liked his style of writing. This line made me giggle Very nice.
sturmeh 6y ago
This is awesome, but I can't imagine how much trouble you'd run into with emoji's being different on different devices, plenty of input methods / printers without support let alone writing your email down on a printed form. (Technically you can write the full encoded form and that will work but you'll have to memorise it.)
ddtaylor 6y ago
> 80 emojis in, forking over money for a goat emoji domain name, you seriously start to question what you're doing.
kureikain 6y ago
I like this idea so much. I woke up this morning and think how can I get an emoji email. I don't want to buy country level tld and ICANN ban emoji domain. Then I realize I can have emoji in email itself. So I quickly add emoji support to my email forwarding service: https://hanami.run https://hanami.run So now anyone can email me at @hanami.run . Note that many mail client may say email is invalid but please send anyway. My mail server supports emoji. So anyone own an domain here, if you like Emoji email, signed up for https://hanami.com https://hanami.com and add your domain in there and configure alias. Try email me at `flower-emoji-hacker-doesn't-support-emoji@hanami.run` Check our docs https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email Long live emoji.
sygma 6y ago
I am old enough to remember what Panic claimed to be the first ever emoji domain in 2011 [0]. But a quick look at the relevant wikipedia entry sets the record straight [1]. [0]: https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/ https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain
visarga 6y ago
untypeable emails
beeforpork 6y ago
It has emoji domains, but disallows emoji accounts. Weird. I cannot have @.kz. This is probably disrupted by HN. I mean I cannot have [thumbsup]@[thumbsup].kz.
ztarven 6y ago
Just got http://xn--f18h.fm http://xn--f18h.fm (rolled up newspaper) for https://newsasfacts.com https://newsasfacts.com. I actually think emoji urls pique people's interest more than traditional urls.
alexellisuk 6y ago
As a self-confessed "indie dev" and have perfected the art of giving away value for free so I love to see stories like this. In a short period of time you've tried out a "crazy" idea that might catch on and you've earned some money already. I hope you can get 10x that income before long. With regards to VAT - when you sell to B2C customers in Europe (which I'm sure you do), you need to charge them VAT in the state they reside in. The easiest way to do this is with something like Paddle [0]. After that, probably registering in Ireland for VAT MOSS [1]. It alarms me how many people start taking payments from Stripe for their new platform without spending any time to get sales/VAT tax compliance in place. Remember when this [2] blew up on the front page of Hacker News about GitHub Sponsors delivering a B2C service, without any VAT applied? That's the same reason that just taking payments with Stripe isn't enough. [0] https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-behalf/ https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sales-of-digital-services-in-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050

1683 points by tinyprojects 6y ago

Ben Stokes is also a very popular English cricketer.

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.

scandox 6y ago
> Everything involved with email is pain. Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.
- ludamad 6y ago
  What would you have done differently?
  - 177tcca 6y ago
    Probably not run an email server. =[
amenod 6y ago
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.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  But in one year he'll have almost doubled his investment unless subscriptions all cancel within the year (highly unlikely with things like domain names / email addresses / etc.)
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  That was before HN though! You have any idea how many eggplant emoji handles he’s sold since?
- cmeacham98 6y ago
  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
manquer 6y ago
Depends. If he is actually running only a forwarder , it is much easier than running an full fledged service with mailboxes and other support.
- LeonM 6y ago
  Running a 'forwarder' still means that you have manage the MTAs, and all the infrastructure around it. It's still a lot of work.
tcgv 6y ago
> 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-hood https://thomasvilhena.com/2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-...
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements ...there's no guarantee anyone else will. Currently I am getting moaned at because the "Money Stuff" newsletter is not arriving - which appears to be because Bloomberg have flubbed their DKIM. What am I supposed to do about that, eh?
dieortin 6y ago
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 by myself? Should I just pay for a big email provider? (They’re quite expensive for the resources my organization has) I’ve tried to set everything up as securely as possible, but I’m not an expert in email either. I’m just afraid I might be creating big trouble for myself in the future.
- TimBurr 6y ago
  I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing). 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!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sshagent 6y ago

I think i might have realised I've become old, when the very idea of an emoji domain causes me anger. sigh

capableweb 6y ago
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.
- robotbikes 6y ago
  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.
  - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
    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.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    I'm not old and I hate it. I don't even know how to insert an emoji on a computer.
- sshagent 6y ago
  Yeah thats what i meant. I should see the fun as the primary part of this. I guess we're just one step away from meme email addresses.
ziml77 6y ago
But it's reasonable. Domains are already surprisingly confusing to people. Emoji in a domain piles on top of that when people have no clue that's possible. Plus it makes it more difficult to communicate the address verbally and it can be hard or even impossible to enter the address in some systems.

prepend 6y ago

> 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 ran into this because I have some forwarders too and if I send an email from gmail that goes out, when my external mail server sends it back to gmail it never gets there. It’s not deleted, it’s not marked as spam, it just doesn’t exist and there’s no record. I suspect if author had sent from another account it would work fine. [0] https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-forwarding-gmail/ https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-...

wccrawford 6y ago
Can confirm. This bit me recently until I thought to use another account for testing.
mns 6y ago
Exchange also does this, if you are part of a group, send an email to that group, you will never get it. We ran into it when one of our systems were sending an alert for a failed action to a group, but it was sending it on behalf of the person that tried to do that action and eventually failed. Everyone in the group was getting the email, except the original person.
- prepend 6y ago
  That’s not so bad, but it’s not as bad as gmail. Exchange will return a message that comes back to the mailbox via a forward. Also, I think, Exchange is doing this because the list is on server and it’s part of Exchange’s deduping. If I send to the list and foo and foo is in the list, foo gets one email, not two. For example, I have foo@gmail.com, foo@outlook.com, foo@prepend.com. I set up foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@gmail.com. If I send a message from bar@gmail.com to foo@prepend.com, it comes through as expected. If I send the same message from foo@gmail.com, I never get it. Prepend.com’s mail server has a record of sending it to gmail.com, but my gmail account has no evidence of it anywhere. If I change foo@prepend.com to forward to foo@outlook.com, I don’t have this problem.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rplnt 6y ago

Cool, but I also wish this wouldn't exist.

williesleg 6y ago

Hooray?

sixhobbits 6y ago

I'm confused by the post about if I can buy g@ or only g@.kz - the post seems to suggest the former but I don't understand how that would work

sixhobbits 6y ago
oh HN doesn't support emojis - that is g@<unicorn-emoji>.kz or g@<unicorn-emoji>
- kuon 6y ago
  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.
  - wohfab 6y ago
    You need a TLD but IIRC, the second level is not required. So you could have something like `http://google http://google`, which I think, Google actually had at some point in the past. Cannot however find anything related to this anymore.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      The .ai TLD has an A record, so http://ai/ http://ai/ works.
      - kuon 6y ago
        Yes, this I understand. But not the other way around.
    - Biganon 6y ago
      I wrote a post about that: https://www.simonjunod.ch/projets/webtld/ https://www.simonjunod.ch/projets/webtld/ It's in French, but it's easy to understand the gist of it
- 6y ago

ylere 6y ago

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.

vidarh 6y ago
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.

Aldipower 6y ago

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

carstenhag 6y ago
For anyone outside the german-speaking countres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps -- In german: Konzentrationslager, abbreviated with KZ. Similarly, never use abbrevations like SS, NS, AH, HH, HJ in Germany. Also, some of these are forbidden on our license plates.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  Are Buddhists and Hinduists allowed to use Swastika in Germany?
  - joeberon 6y ago
    Yes
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Yes they are. The Swastika is a religious symbol, the Hakenkreuz is not.
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    The German swastika is a mirror reflection of the religious icon, btw.
    - qwerty456127 6y ago
      No, it isn't. Dharmaic traditions use both directions.
      - dheera 6y ago
        This is correct.

quickthrower2 6y ago

I really enjoyed the rabbit hole and sort of wished you made more money. I think you need FOMO to get this to take off. My idea would be to join clubhouse app (I can invite you if you need) and tell people about your story as it’s entertaining, get some influencers there to have an emoji email on their bio as a contact - which is a perfect fit as most bios have a lot of emojis and clubhouse has no DM feature but people like to get I touch. The idea is a nice mix of utility and craze. Better than those NFTs in my opinion. Plus I’m tempted to get one :) I’ll sleep on it though. Good luck!

path411 6y ago
I bet since this hacker news post he's made much more money.

kuu 6y ago

Really fun idea and interesting to see how it grew and grew :)

teddyh 6y ago

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.

tester34 6y ago
I think you may expect way too much from such a simple website
- emodendroket 6y ago
  Supporting Unicode characters is too much?
  - scbrg 6y ago
    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.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      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).
      - xPaw 6y ago
        Is HN actually filtering these, or they use utf8 in mysql which is famously not full utf8mb4?
        capableweb 6y ago
        Hah, you think HN would use something mainstream like mysql?! I don't blame you. But HN is 100% custom software, and built with it's own programming language as well, Arc (on Racket). AFAIK, HN still runs on files-as-a-db. You could check out the source here: http://arclanguage.org/install http://arclanguage.org/install

pwdisswordfish0 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421454

quickthrower2 6y ago
This is not that

Toutouxc 6y ago

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 line.

Tepix 6y ago
The emoji part is charming. The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!
- maybevain 6y ago
  Personal preferences aside, the original article [0] on the Netflix and Facebook domains gives context which is no less charming, at least on ethical grounds. Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want." [0] https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
On the mailoji website it says you cannot currently send emails using your mailoji address. It's just for forwarding mail to your main inbox at the moment
gnopgnip 6y ago
The clever part about this is they don't deal with deliverability at all. This is only for incoming email.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Borat would be proud of you.

EugeneOZ 6y ago

> and yes, most form validations hate them. Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously resistant to following the specifications.

flal_ 6y ago
I used to have an email address at university along the line of "f.d'a@university.edu". I couldn't make use of it, because no-one believed it was a valid address even though it is allowed by the goddam RFC. turns out you could put a lot of funky stuff in the local part of an email, spaces ? yep. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5
- sybercecurity 6y ago
  always relevant: "So you think you can validate email addresses": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxX81WmXjPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxX81WmXjPg Which is also why proposals to put email certs (S/MIME, OpenPGP) in the DNS led to hashing the local part, as DNS only allows ASCII and is case insensitive.
- Biganon 6y ago
  Pretty stupid of your university to give you this address. Sure it's technically valid, but they know perfectly well it will be refused almost everywhere, and even when not explicitly refused, it will cause bugs. Being technically correct is useless if you're the only one doing it.
  - flal_ 6y ago
    Yes, it was I guess that was a bug I'm the student name to email generator. They quickly provided me a convenient alias but I was still able to receive mail at the address with the apostrophe, and it was cool. Having an apostrophe in my name still triggers a surprising numbers of bugs to this day...

petercooper 6y ago

There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/ 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(!) :-)

pull_my_finger 6y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Like how many UK businesses and individuals had to give up their .eu domain name after leaving the EU.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    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.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      It could be a fraud prevention and accidental legal misrepresentation defense mechanism to take away the .eu domains from the UK. If you go to a .eu domain and buy something you would expect not to be subject to import duties etc.
    - tialaramex 6y ago
      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.

johnbatch 6y ago

I’m surprised it doesn’t support emoji in the name field. No <emoji>@<emoji>.kz

Tepix 6y ago
When email addresses were standardized, unicode wasn't around. For domains and hostnames we have punycode which maps unicode characters onto the ASCII charset, which is why it works. This does not apply to the user portion of the email address. Emoji as part of the display name should work, i.e. "Emoji" <user@emoji.kz>
- layer8 6y ago
  RFC 6531 adds support for internationalized local-parts. Support in actual software may be lacking though.
  - ganzsz 6y ago
    I sometimes run into sites that won't even allow a + in the name part of an email address. And yes, I use gmail and the + functionality extensively.
    - layer8 6y ago
      In the early days I used "/" in local parts, which is syntactically valid. That turned out to be a bad idea, as some mail software was mapping local-parts to file names...

monstersinF 6y ago

Fun idea! But It’s too bad that Kazakhstan’s decision to MITM all HTTPS traffic makes this a nonstarter for actual use https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-intercepting-all-https-traffic/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-i...

Tepix 6y ago
That seems completely unrelated to an email service, especially if most of its users are outside of Kazakhstan.
- qmarchi 6y ago
  .kz registrants, like many ccTLDs, are required to host core services within the borders of Kazakhstan.
scaladev 6y ago
They don't MITM anything. There were a few ridiculously incompetent failed attempts. There will undoubtedly be more, but HTTPS works fine at the moment. Just wanted to clarify this.
dbrgn 6y ago
With the state of unicode support in the legacy systems that make up of our e-mail infrastructure, I doubt any emoji domain will be ready for any actual use, where you rely on e-mails being actually delivered to you.

amenod 6y ago

I have a domain that would be great for an e-mail forwarding service, but I have second throughts about starting it... Is there someone here with experience in this area? What should the OP be most scared of?

Tepix 6y ago
Abuse by spammers and criminals, DDoS and hacking attempts for starters. Lots of spam complaints to handle manually. Also payments using stolen credit cards.
kureikain 6y ago
I run an email forwarding service call https://hanami.run https://hanami.run It's fun because you gotta learn alot about email. Especially when you play with DKIM, ARC chain you found yourself reading through RFC. Or when I discover weird issue like this: https://hanami.run/blog/posts/the-quirks-of-gmail-ui/ https://hanami.run/blog/posts/the-quirks-of-gmail-ui/ I think the OP mail one is for fun, people who registered an emoji email properly expect some fun aspect and OK with email being lost. In practice, the most scared thing is having your IP on blacklist. Very quickly people will complain when they lost email or too many email goes to spam or just rejected completely. Due to the nature of email forwarding, people usually own the domain, so they use random address for many random website(coupon, download free ebooks, shitty newsletter...) so it attract a large amount of spammer I have to constantly deal with now. When gmail return a 550 in their SMTP server(550 mean they block/rate limiting), I got a bit worry at first but I learnt to live with it nowsaday

matsemann 6y ago

Why so fixating on buying google.<tld>, netflix.<tld>, facebook.<tld> etc? The fact that one of those might be available does not make them valuable at all.

macksd 6y ago
You can resell it to another speculator. Which I don't like, but isn't so different from a cryptocurrency that is never actually used for trade.

kureikain 6y ago

My hat off to tinyprojects. This is a very cool project and I'm so happy to see they wrote this at the end: > But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun. Apparently I run https://hanami.run https://hanami.run an email forwarding service and I also say that https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future > At the same time, we like to make email more fun. We are commited to build tools that help you process email easily. Your banks don’t have an API to help you build a real-time activity tracker? Just use email. Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site. I'm thinking about comment for a static site. Simply send an email to a magic address to comment? Similar to news letter? Anyone like this idea

holistio 6y ago
Do you have some protection filters on for https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz? I cautiously opened the site and was basically prepared to be greeted with (child) pornography. How do you prevent that?
- kureikain 6y ago
  I rely on email spam filterting, which seems effectively filter out them. No sophisicated filtering yet. I didn't advertise it anywhere outside of Hacker News and not many people know about it yet.
tzfld 6y ago
>https://pix.fastloop.xyz https://pix.fastloop.xyz Nice but I see some risks there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)
- kureikain 6y ago
  wow, thanks so much for that information. I'll have it migrate to some different domain.

weinzierl 6y ago

This is a great fun project but a risky business idea. Only 13 registrars allow emoji now and one could also say only 13 still allow them. It is well possible that they will stop supporting emoji, like other registrars did in the past. How do I know? Many years ago happen to own the single unicode character domain name that was coincidentally very similar to the logo of my website. At some point the registrar informed me that my domain will not be allowed by the NICs rules anymore and they had to cancel it. Made me a bit sad, but it ever was only a novelty anyways.

Gys 6y ago

> Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks. Appreciate the honesty of a few weeks. The number of great looking projects on HN that mention 'build last weekend' are hard to belief.

latexr 6y ago

> 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-it-take-2-days-2-months-or-2-years-88b91d8e1c https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did...

LeonM 6y ago

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.

shp0ngle 6y ago
This service doesn’t support even sending, just receiving. So I don’t think there is DKIM even considered.
- sofixa 6y ago
  Or SPF for that matter.
  - toxik 6y ago
    It should have an SPF record saying nobody can send as that domain.
- LeonM 6y ago
  It says send support is 'coming soon' on the website, so expectations are already set for those paying for this service.
- motoboi 6y ago
  It needs DKIM so other people cannot send e-mail pretending to be you.

unnouinceput 6y ago

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?

had-rien 6y ago
I've purchased an email to try it (not for serious stuff of course). So for now you cannot send an email, only receive one. When someone sends an email to your emoji account then it s forwarded to an actual email address of your choice. The mail will have the following signature at the end : Sent via Mailoji. Don't reply to this email. Reply to the sender email address below From Sender Name: sender@email.com to your Mailoji you@emoji.kz ---------

bikson 6y ago

I'm still don't know why emoji's are a thing.

krapp 6y ago
People like to communicate their emotions through cute pictograms, it's not difficult to understand.
- Biganon 6y ago
  I find it fascinating that some people fail to understand that. It's so obvious. Emojis are hugely useful to convey intent and emotion. But they're relatively new, so I suppose they're automatically stupid, get off my lawn etc etc
macksd 6y ago
Emotional context is easily lost over text. Adding an emoji at the end helps makes it more explicit when you're employing irony, sarcasm, or when expressing a genuine emotion like sadness.

mbreese 6y ago

And now, I own yet another domain name. At least this one is so that my kid can have a very unique email address. That’s some high quality tween cred.

jefe_ 6y ago

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 interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'

gottavomment 6y ago
This is art. I worked as a cashier for a couple years, and this feels like a fever dream about those days.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Sample size dichotomy. From a customer's perspective, this is the way everyone does things. (Sample size: themselves) From a cashier's perspective, this weirdo is a few standard deviations outside the mean. (Sample size: 1,000+ customers)
duiker101 6y ago
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.

blfr 6y ago

The real scoop is Netflix.soy. Excellent. https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy

throwaway_kufu 6y ago

I started registering some emoji domains on Ethereum Name Service, not to be a total squatter I’m building static sites and deploying them on IPFS...it’s fun but expensive so hopefully NFT dWeb/web3 domains turn out to have cryptoart value. The use case mostly seems to be a novelty wallet address but I’m going full blown GeoCities with building decentralized websites. I even built a NFT search engine deployed on IPFS at geocities.eth The emoji domains are cool in theory but there are issues to say the least. Many services asking for your domain name don’t recognize the emoji character (google programmable search engine, fleek, github, etc...). I did manage to “hack” the system a little and register a single character emoji domain ( .eth) because it renders as 3 characters.

ape4 6y ago

Why can't you pick an emoji as username

maybevain 6y ago
The local part (i.e. "username") of an email is restricted to a limited set of valid characters. https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html https://www.jochentopf.com/email/chars.html

jkhdigital 6y ago

> complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji" Almost spit out my coffee laughing at this

marckohlbrugge 6y ago

Emoji domains are a lot of fun for sure. Shameless plug: A few years ago I discovered them for the first time and made https://.to https://.to which listed all available single-emoji domains for the .to extension. Within a few days hundreds of emoji domains were registered and very few were left. I think I netted the registrar 10,000s of $$$ in days. (I got a nice commission myself as well of course). Edit: okay so HN doesn't like emoji domains – here's a blog post that goes into more detail with the actual URL: https://marc.io/emoji-domains https://marc.io/emoji-domains

vbezhenar 6y ago

Please note that all kz domains must be served by servers located inside Kazakhstan.

rwmj 6y ago

I thought IETF had banned emoji domain names after the unicode snowman was registered? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572)

alexmingoia 6y ago
I did too... I’m assuming some registrars just haven’t properly dealt with this case.
- setBoolean 6y ago
  ICANN banned emoji gTLDs. But there are ccTLD registries that don't fall under ICANN regulations.

marban 6y ago

Thanks for the reminder, I now own a double rainbow domain.

elliekelly 6y ago
It’s a bummer the username can’t be an emoji, too. <money bag>@<rainbow><rainbow>.kz would be an awesome email address.

plumeria 6y ago

Ironically, you cannot use emojis for the username (e.g. :crab:@:crab: )

aaron_oxenrider 6y ago
I found this strange too. I wonder if there is some other technical reason or just somehow didn't think of this in the validation?

rendall 6y ago

I went to [lightbulb-emoji].kz and it transformed to http://xn--ds8h.kz http://xn--ds8h.kz

nancy99 6y ago
That is to prevent phishing with latin characters that look identical to normal ones.
Biganon 6y ago
That's punycode. Your browser is configured to display everything as ascii, using the punycode "transcoding". It's a good practice, see the binance hack that used binance.com with a tiny diacritic on one of the letters, that lead to a huge phishing attack.

had-rien 6y ago

I like the idea of having an email dedicated to joke and not serious stuff so I rushed to register one. Kind of disappointed that I cannot send an email now, it takes away a lot of fun until I can especially since I've learned about this after paying :/

ghoomketu 6y ago

This guy seems crazy about registering weird domain names. netflix.soy, google(.hebrew).. good to see him making his money back and kudos for doing the jokes so thouroghly. I too have such crazy stupid ideas all the time, but it's one thing to think about it and another to actually finish it and start marketing it with videos on producthunt and tiktok.

totetsu 6y ago

Emojis are "fun" in the same way hallmark melody greeting cards are "fun"

Thoughtful 6y ago

Emojis in subject lines can sometimes cause issues with ticketing systems, so I can only imagine how ticketing systems will like emojis as domains.

sitzkrieg 6y ago

the author may like to know Cyrillic doesn't automatically mean Russian

simias 6y ago
The website is in Russian though. The author probably knew that because he had to use some online translation tool to go through the purchase process. Fun fact: the Kazakh government decided to replace Cyrillic with Latin for the Kazakh language. Apparently the process is supposed to end in 2025, but I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment.
- sitzkrieg 6y ago
  ah wow neat
- scaladev 6y ago
  >I have no idea how widely adopted the new alphabet is at the moment Not much. Most publications and websites are still using the old alphabet, including the most important government portal which is used by pretty much everybody: https://egov.kz/cms/kk https://egov.kz/cms/kk I rarely see it on anything more substantial than ad banners and propaganda posters (like "don't litter" and "vote for our beloved leader").

altgans 6y ago

Why stop at emojis? Why use the aubergine emoji when you can instead use ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs[1]? There is even an anti-aubergine [2]! In my opinion there is an untapped marked here. And it also is a "full circle" moment - i bet in the next millennium emojis will also be counted as hieroglyphs. 1: https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/ https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/ 2: https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/ https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/

_jal 6y ago
Heavy use of emoji is a great way to make me stop reading. I don't parse images super well - icon buttons in applications slow me down a lot, too. Mentally trying to reconstruct meaning from icons might be a fun recreation, but it is a high-load, annoying waste of time for me when we just need to convey some info. Use your words, or I'm likely to check out at some point.
hedora 6y ago
Try explaining how to type “Bob@naughty-croquet-hieroglyph.kz” in mixed company.
runnr_az 6y ago
I built a site for that: https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com https://weirdonecharacterdomainsuperstore.com
- cptwunderlich 6y ago
  Uff, φ is all sold out :smh:
- sabertoothed 6y ago
  On my machine (Ubuntu, Chrome), every special character is literally just a rectangle. Makes the website look a bit less interesting that way ;) I am not techie enough to be able to fix the view at my end.

goldcd 6y ago

Just wanted to say I enjoyed that story - whimsical little tech project, written up in an entertaining and informative manner. Not that I dislike more serious stories, but nice to have a mix.

CyanDeparture 6y ago

I will never use this, but I'm delighted it exsits.

aequitas 6y ago

Why even bother with registering emoji domains? Just allow people to register bob.<emoji>@mailoji.com. TikTok users probably wouldn't care where the emoji was in the email address. Most non technical people don't even understand email addresses (you work here too? is the most common question I get when I tell people my email is <theircompanyname>@mydomain.com). Only internet nerds really care that the emoji is in the domain name.

ada1981 6y ago

Missed opportunity here is to have made this free with a "powered by emojimail" link. Give people 1 month free for every friend they refer and after 3 months charge them for the year.

silentsea90 6y ago

This is so cool, wish I were as good an engineer as you! I am sadly trapped in my backend big tech world and haven't spent time nor effort to dig myself out of that hole

rntksi 6y ago

Can you have emoji@emoji.emoji email address? So your email address would just be 5 "characters" including the @ and the dot

cyberlab 6y ago

Just be careful with ccTLDs. Read more about the .IO debacle a few years back: https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/ https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-... Also recently, Notion had issues with their .SO TLD More info here: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-schedule-app-dns-technical https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-sche... > but some speculated that it may have to do with Notion’s web address: notion.so. The “so” suffix is the domain for the country of Somalia, and a deleted tweet from Notion asked if anyone knew people in Somalia.

finiteseries 6y ago
A decade ago, Artsy had to move away from art.sy when Syria was sanctioned by the US. The .ly’s and Libya were around that time too, I’m not sure if any of them were affected though.

ing33k 6y ago

Borat would say "very nice"

simias 6y ago

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 it work correctly.

rhythmofrest 6y ago
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?"
- tenacious_tuna 6y ago
  I've come to believe that there's a certain amount of insanity required to be a great entrepreneur. Like Jobs or Musk--their personal qualities aside, they both had arguably legitimately insane visions that they refused to let people talk them out of. The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).
  - hilbertseries 6y ago
    Steve Job didn’t invent the smartphone and Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car, they did both make those things cool. Steve Jobs also had a treatable form of pancreatic cancer and died from it, because he refused traditional medicine. You can point to countless inventions and advances in humanity that are not due to crazy asshole geniuses. What happens to people is that the better you are at something, the more willing they are to forgive your flaws. This allows those flaws to grow and grow, to the point where you’re accusing random people that insult you of being pedophiles. But these flaws are not a requisite part of being driven and not giving up.

dheera 6y ago

This seems ripe for phishing, similar to @аррӏе.com (which isn't @apple.com -- go ahead and check) and someone actually did this once. [0] There are lots of emojis that are hard to tell apart from each other. [0] https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/ https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/

vmception 6y ago

> 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” (remember: the bank doesn't actually care about their anti-money laundering statutes either, they care about you giving them a reason to care, which is very different.)

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
>I always have shelf businesses registered and available for this. Don't you pay an annual fee for these?

tener 6y ago

Huh. Neat idea, but why does emoji needs to be a part of the domain? <rocket>@emojimail.com would work just fine? Plus, you can have mail aliases that way and combine multiple emoji too. <rocket><moon>@emojimail.com could be equivalent to rocket.moon@emojimail.com for compatibility purposes.

chias 6y ago
IIRC the email spec requires all characters to be ASCII. Technically your email address isn't bob@[mailbox].kz, it's bob@xn--h78h.kz which your browser and possibly some mail clients will render as bob@[mailbox].kz. But xn--h78h@emojimail.com will always just display as xn--h78h@emojimail.com. For the domain part, browsers and email providers have collectively agreed to render domains of the form xn-[stuff]-[stuff].[tld] according to the Punycode specification, but no such rendering exists for the username.
- tener 6y ago
  The ASCII only restriction feels very artificial. I wouldn't be surprised to find some work in progress to lift it. Edit: yep, there is clearly work in that area and not even that recent. Of course support is spotty depending on actual software in use. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/760150/can-an-email-address-contain-international-non-english-characters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/760150/can-an-email-addr...

acvny 6y ago

This promotional video is epic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c

CalChris 6y ago

That was freaking awesome. 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tobib 6y ago

I love how it says everywhere to "buy" a TLD when it's really renting or leasing. It's not like it's a one time payment and then you own it.

tobib 6y ago
Is this wrong? Am I misunderstanding anything? I'm genuinely curious.

AndyMcConachie 6y ago

ICANN SSAC Advisory on the Use of Emoji in Domain Names https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf A good document outlining many of the issues with using Emoji in domain names.

easyKL 6y ago

TLD .cf supports emoji and can be bought for free (up to 12 months). Now good luck finding a reseller that processes the purchase of an emoji domain name.....

Symbiote 6y ago
I just bought (not with the free deal) a one-letter emoji .cf domain name. €9 at Freenom.com. (It would probably have been better to use the free deal for a few months first.)

closeparen 6y ago

This is awesome. But why make the recipient copy and paste the reply address? Can't you use the Reply-To header?

tijuco2 6y ago

"The next step was to convince someone else to buy an emoji email address. TikTok seemed like a good place to start given its demographic" that's accurate haha

blackearl 6y ago

This is hilarious. I just tested it as a subdomain. O365 flatout won't let me send to emoji addresses, at least through the regular browser UI. Gmail is happy to oblige though

Paradigm2020 6y ago

Read the full article and watched your amazing trailer :) but loved the last line and fully agreed: "But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun." Right on man !!! Applause. Added to personal wish list when I'm not sinking all my money in domain names & startup :).

Dries007 6y ago

I bought <beer>@<computer>.kz but it doesn't work, the forwarder doesn't have SMTPUTF8 support sadly. The QA engineer in my couldn't not try that one :)

e-clinton 6y ago

Great job. Consider offering a more expensive option like $50 free forever. Also $10/year feels cheap for such a fun project.... try a random number like $16, I’m sure you’d have similar conversion. Kudos

mfkp 6y ago

I'd be more inclined to use it if he doubled up on the domains, for example also providing "clownemoji.kz" as well as (actual clown emoji).kz (so if I were to tell someone my email is "mfkp at clown emoji dot kz", they could either use the clown emoji, or spell it out.

heleninboodler 6y ago

Neat. Suggestion: it would be useful to have a text search so I can see if you have a particular emoji without having to squint at the whole list.

dmitrygr 6y ago

> It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up. And this is why they are "all taken" on all other domains...

kalipso 6y ago

I would recommend advertising that at https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/ the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere

roozbeh18 6y ago
hah
simias 6y ago
I was actually just thinking that he should probably register the [diamond][hands].kk domain, there's got to be some demand for it given how much it gets spammed over there.
- magneticnorth 6y ago
  Diamond hands appears to be taken everywhere listed by the mainstream emoji registration sites, sadly. It was a good idea
- rileytg 6y ago
  way ahead of you... OP was right, it was a pain to use that registrar.
- diamond_hands 6y ago
  https://xn--tr8hi8e.kz/ https://xn--tr8hi8e.kz/
  - high_byte 6y ago
    that was quick
  - nerdb4itwascool 6y ago
    OP sort of deserves this. His little commercial there shows the diamond hands emoji but he never registered it
  - 6y ago

beiller 6y ago

My God! I've been waiting for this since the day the architects told me "only ASCII characters are allowed in the email database field"

koboll 6y ago

I'm kinda disappointed that I can't register an emoji handle. No diamond at hands dot kz for me, I suppose.

Zelphyr 6y ago

This was such a fun read. It inspired me to buy http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/ http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/ Edit 1: TIL Hacker News doesn't support emoji. lol Edit 2: Yeah, I know; that's a cow, not a bull. Don't yuck my yum!

leokennis 6y ago

Registered an e-mail address. I’ll probably only use it to mildly impress some people and it’s entirely possible it will stop working within the year. Then again, it’s $9.99...

felixfbecker 6y ago

How does this work? Is it converted to some super ugly punycode, or do domains actually support full Unicode?

simonbarker87 6y ago

This is delightful, enjoy your massive headache running this thing

zacharycohn 6y ago

You're a monster. This was a delightful read.

opinologo 6y ago

"I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need." Kudos to the author for such a fun project

sideproject 6y ago

For anyone who is going down the impulse-buying of many domains (me!) and then finding yourself having too many unused domains, I created a little tool to make use of those unused domains (and maybe even monetize them) https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co

siltpotato 6y ago

I've been seeing more of this title recently and can't suss out the pattern. Is this about it? "I x'd (something ridiculous) [and (more ridiculous)]"

zepearl 6y ago

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...)

styfle 6y ago
Yes, but it will likely show up as punycode in the browser address bar, for example http://xn--938h.to http://xn--938h.to And sadly, you can't post emoji on hackernews comments :(
- zepearl 6y ago
  Thank you (http://xn--938h.to/ http://xn--938h.to/ seems to perform a redirect? I see "meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://webcoliving.com/japanese.html 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 :)

stilisstuk 6y ago

What is the rfc regarding usernames? Can emojis only work on the main domain? Can't we have [emoji]@[emoji].kx?

krick 6y ago

When I see something like that, I feel genuinely ashamed I didn't do it myself yet. This is so stupid and impractical (seriously, imagine having an email address no email form validator even accepts), that it must be successful. So, congrats, OP.

alhamallwh 6y ago

International women's clothing and shoes CLICK HERE http://raghadstayl.com/ http://raghadstayl.com/

shroom 6y ago

Great read and really liked his style of writing. This line made me giggle Very nice.

sturmeh 6y ago

This is awesome, but I can't imagine how much trouble you'd run into with emoji's being different on different devices, plenty of input methods / printers without support let alone writing your email down on a printed form. (Technically you can write the full encoded form and that will work but you'll have to memorise it.)

ddtaylor 6y ago

> 80 emojis in, forking over money for a goat emoji domain name, you seriously start to question what you're doing.

kureikain 6y ago

I like this idea so much. I woke up this morning and think how can I get an emoji email. I don't want to buy country level tld and ICANN ban emoji domain. Then I realize I can have emoji in email itself. So I quickly add emoji support to my email forwarding service: https://hanami.run https://hanami.run So now anyone can email me at @hanami.run . Note that many mail client may say email is invalid but please send anyway. My mail server supports emoji. So anyone own an domain here, if you like Emoji email, signed up for https://hanami.com https://hanami.com and add your domain in there and configure alias. Try email me at `flower-emoji-hacker-doesn't-support-emoji@hanami.run` Check our docs https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email Long live emoji.

sygma 6y ago

I am old enough to remember what Panic claimed to be the first ever emoji domain in 2011 [0]. But a quick look at the relevant wikipedia entry sets the record straight [1]. [0]: https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/ https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

visarga 6y ago

untypeable emails

beeforpork 6y ago

It has emoji domains, but disallows emoji accounts. Weird. I cannot have @.kz. This is probably disrupted by HN. I mean I cannot have [thumbsup]@[thumbsup].kz.

ztarven 6y ago

Just got http://xn--f18h.fm http://xn--f18h.fm (rolled up newspaper) for https://newsasfacts.com https://newsasfacts.com. I actually think emoji urls pique people's interest more than traditional urls.

alexellisuk 6y ago

As a self-confessed "indie dev" and have perfected the art of giving away value for free so I love to see stories like this. In a short period of time you've tried out a "crazy" idea that might catch on and you've earned some money already. I hope you can get 10x that income before long. With regards to VAT - when you sell to B2C customers in Europe (which I'm sure you do), you need to charge them VAT in the state they reside in. The easiest way to do this is with something like Paddle [0]. After that, probably registering in Ireland for VAT MOSS [1]. It alarms me how many people start taking payments from Stripe for their new platform without spending any time to get sales/VAT tax compliance in place. Remember when this [2] blew up on the front page of Hacker News about GitHub Sponsors delivering a B2C service, without any VAT applied? That's the same reason that just taking payments with Stripe isn't enough. [0] https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-behalf/ https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sales-of-digital-services-in-the-eu https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050