I happen to own mylastname.org and it has kind of been a problem if I’m being honest. I finally had to start start carrying around cards with my email address printed on them. People can’t handle it, they expect personal names to come before the @ and if you say anything after the @ besides gmail or hotmail or a business name they absolutely shut down.<p>I’m sure it doesn’t help that my last name seems like it’s misspelled...
Came up with the idea for this with my wife and decided to build it! Been dogfooding it with my family and am now sharing it with the rest of the world.<p>Tech stack is Node/Express running on Dokku/Digital Ocean for the API. UI is built using Parcel and hosted on Netlify.<p>Would love to hear your thoughts and happy to answer any questions you folks may have :-)
I think even just offering @namekin.com as an option, and allowing people to start mailing lists for their families would be awesome as well (of course, offering this for the domain option works too). Since some last names are way too common, it could even make sense to figure out a good list of most common domains to buy ahead of time and offer to use them to families. Of course you gotta make sure they understand other families with the same last name could be using those domains.<p>You could offer a single @namekin email as a sample of the whole service as well, which might go a long way and get you more feedback.
You might think about adding chat into the mix. You could look at possibly rebasing onto Crossbox ( <a href="https://crossbox.io" rel="nofollow">https://crossbox.io</a> ),which also incorporates chat + some other stuff (I have no affiliation, just stumbled across it recently and the demo is pretty attractive). Or you could probably easily add an XMPP chat server/service onto whatever you've already built..
It looks quite cheap for someone with a larger family. But there's nothing substantial on the privacy page. I'd expect at least some more verbiage on how data will be handled and won't be handled. It also doesn't state how much disk space quota is allocated, how many mails can be sent, whether each user can choose multiple aliases, and any other limits that come close to what's considered abuse.<p>Tangentially, it's also amusing to see "family name" so ingrained in so many cultures that it's assumed that people who are part of a family will have a common name. Around the world, this implicit assumption breaks so many things for the people who culturally don't follow these (including visa applications, website forms, etc.). See point #20 here. [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...</a>
It's a great idea that a lot if families need. It's not clear what it costs and its not clear if we use our name domain or your domain and what happens if it's not available. The white glove service is spot on, the person who would pay for this would not be the person who would know how to do it themselves. And finally, this is a great anti Facebook family product and I think you should mention that somewhere. Hth
Looks great, but one concern is lock-in or name hijacking. How do you guarantee that if I buy my domain name with you, it will actually be mine and not yours? This is important if I wish to migrate to a different provider one day without asking all my contacts to change my email address.
I suggest making pricing a bit more obvious.<p>You arent collecting actionable (ie current email or similar to follow up) information prior to showing the price either, so I am not sure what you gain by hiding it.
I put in my family name, which contains a letter with a diacritic mark. It showed every domain as "unavailable". I suggest normalizing to ASCII.