So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBus#Emoji_input
The kitty terminal emulator supports this out of the box (it also works on two other platforms):
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
Ctrl+Shift+U opens a Unicode input panel with fuzzy search by symbol code or name.
And if it's not, please go update your Windows. You should not be reading HN with out outdated operating system.
The script is easy to extend with new emojis, and also supports selecting alternatives based on which program you had focus on when invoking the keyboard - you can see it using Skype-specific notation for Skype.
--
[0] - https://www.autohotkey.com/ - it's the keyboard rebinding / advanced automation platform for Windows. Literally the first thing I install on a new Windows machine (mostly for rebinding Caps Lock to Ctrl).
[1] - https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/d330edccf8ba9a2b13d01b4e7f1...
Last time I booked a car at Hertz:
> Me: My email is hertz@capableweb.work
> Agent: Woah, you work here at Hertz? That's so cool
> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?
So many email validations fail with a uncommon gTLD that I started switching everything to a .com domain instead. Sometimes I even get rejected when my email address contains the company name... "Sorry, your email seems invalid" is all I get, but changing one letter of the company name makes it pass the validation...
<business-name>.inc.construction
I thought it was clever, but people do not understand them. Everything is .com in their mind.
firstname @ (nickname for firstname) + (last initial) .net
And it's amazing how hard it is to explain this to people over the phone or in store for email receipts, etc.
I'm shocked how few folks seems to be vaguely aware that .net as TLD exists even though it's one of the original TLDs from when they were first created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net
I also have firstmiddlelast@gmail.com, and about half the time I tell someone my email address, the send it to the gmail one.
For services that actually require correspondence, I register the cool fun tld and a seperate .com for email
This also lets mailing lists het marked as spam without harming the deliverability of the other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory
EG if my surname was "Gummersby" my email domain is "Gummers.by"
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)
Why wouldn’t you throw stuff all over the floor. It’s the biggest shelf in the room.
This kind of prose is truly hilarious.
Thank you.
Bill burr on his podcast was talking about, when he first discovered reddit. He couldn't understand what it was... He then realized later.. "it's a site for people that really like to type.. that's what it is.."
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.
I disagree.
We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this. But any non-technical person who sees 'get a next-gen email addresses' being advertised for 9,99/year will expect more. A lot more.
Do not underestimate how naive and demanding consumers can be.
;)
After all, people pay money to obtain these. Why anybody paying a subscription fee would expect that the product is useless?
I don't know, we said the same thing about jeans.
It’ll work out either way.
I’m not going to shed a tear for gmail if they have to start putting up with someone else’s busted non-standard email infrastructure. They should be able to get what they give.
Except, that will never happen. What's more likely, Gmail changes what they do to accomodate some goofy emoji system, or users of some goofy emoji system get frustrated about it's incompatibility and stop using it because it is so frustrating? I'm not talking about tech nerds on HN or the likes. I'm talking about FOMO/YOLO types that think it's "cool", but then new shiny happens, and they just forget about. One group significantly outnumbers the other.
TLS and MTA-STS are for receiving and would be good to set up, eventually.
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.
This isn't about relationship status, the author of this post just has money to burn.
And even if the author expected to get their money back through paid sales...they're on the hook for those accounts now unless he personally writes it off.
There's a PSA running on Australian radio these days that says if your spouse doesn't let you control your own money, that's a form of abuse. There's even a hotline to report that you're being abused.
(Heard it on 2GB/Sydney last week.)
From the looks of the author’s website, he very carefully time boxes his projects and weighs the expense and revenue generation. This is very different from spending a grand on something with unbounded time costs and no tangible return, like buying a boat.
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).
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(!) :-)
Unfortunately the were asked for some documentation they couldn't provide a few months later and it got shut down.
Any country TLD is a potential risk that most western "entrepreneurs" blissfully ignore.
Just a month ago notion.so had troubles with it's domain because .so belongs to Somalia, and Somalia changed some rules around registration and ownership [1]
The same, really, goes for Tonga's http://dev.to, Libya's http://bit.ly or Greenland's http://goo.gl...
[1] https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1360239738020634629
IOW not available to citizens or companies in Europe, but not member of the EU eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina
[0] Who can register a .it domain? https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/faq
The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.
But you shouldn't use TLDs of countries with which you have no affiliation.
Especially given Ive heard some of these TLDs are cheaper to encourage their use, people who want to run services on these should be careful even if enforcement is often lax or nonexistent until a complaint is filed.
The information on Wikipedia itself is mostly descriptive, while the registry website or other external links should have the actual rules and restrictions.
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-...
In a perhaps apocryphal story, at least one person was fired when a malicious coworker used this to forge harassing emails from the victim.
I ended up build a "Test button" where customer click, then we send an email from our own address and let them know why we did that and also link to your link.
Gmail is no doubt very useful but they have quite of few of quirks.
Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.
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-...
...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?
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.
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.
the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere
> But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.
Apparently I run https://hanami.run an email forwarding service and I also say that
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 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
Nice but I see some risks there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)
I cautiously opened the site and was basically prepared to be greeted with (child) pornography. How do you prevent that?
I like the commenting idea.
Such emails would look _very_ sketchy to most Germans
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.
The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!
Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want."
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.
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.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-i...
Just wanted to clarify this.
⬛ ⌛ ⏳ ⌚ ⏰ ⏱ ⏲ ♟⌨♨♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ 🃏 🀄⬆ ↗ ↘ ⬇ ↙ ⬅ ↖ ↕ ↔ ↩ ↪ ⤴ ⤵ ▶ ⏩ ⏭ ⏯ ◀ ⏪ ⏮ ⏫ ⏬ ⏸ ⏹ ⏺ ⏏‼ ⁉〰⭕〽© ® ™ #⃣ ⃣ 0⃣ 1⃣ 2⃣ 3⃣ 4⃣ 5⃣ 6⃣ 7⃣ 8⃣ 9⃣ 🅰 🆎 🅱 🆑 🆒 🆓 ℹ 🆔 Ⓜ 🆕 🆖 🅾 🆗 🅿 🆘 🆙 🆚 🈁 🈂 🈷 🈶 🈯 🉐 🈹 🈚 🈲 🉑 🈸 🈴 🈳 ㊗ ㊙ 🈺 🈵 ⬛ ⬜ ◼ ◻ ◾ ◽ ▪ ▫ # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
g@<unicorn-emoji>.kz
g@<unicorn-emoji>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/
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
Lots of spam complaints to handle manually. Also payments using stolen credit cards.
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!
Note: In the FAQ it says the price is $5/yr, but it seems to be $9.99 now.
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.
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.
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...)
And sadly, you can't post emoji on hackernews comments :(
Also recently, Notion had issues with their .SO TLD More info here: 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.
The .ly’s and Libya were around that time too, I’m not sure if any of them were affected though.
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
---------
Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously resistant to following the specifications.
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>
(It would probably have been better to use the free deal for a few months first.)
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.
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-... [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050
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.
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.
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.
Appreciate the honesty of a few weeks. The number of great looking projects on HN that mention 'build last weekend' are hard to belief.
Kudos to the author for such a fun project
Then I realize I can have emoji in email itself. So I quickly add emoji support to my email forwarding service: 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 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
Long live emoji.
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 :/
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.)
Not that I dislike more serious stories, but nice to have a mix.
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.
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.
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!
"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 :).
So, congrats, OP.
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.
Shameless plug: A few years ago I discovered them for the first time and made 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
The QA engineer in my couldn't not try that one :)
Then again, it’s $9.99...
And this is why they are "all taken" on all other domains...
This is probably disrupted by HN. I mean I cannot have [thumbsup]@[thumbsup].kz.
So your email address would just be 5 "characters" including the @ and the dot
Almost spit out my coffee laughing at this
Very nice.
> (…)
> 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...