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.<p>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.
There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per <a href="https://nic.kz/rules/" rel="nofollow">https://nic.kz/rules/</a>) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan.<p>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(!) :-)
I would recommend advertising that at <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/</a><p>the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere
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.'
Maybe the whole covid thing lowered my happiness-level standards, but I find this charming.<p>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.
My hat off to tinyprojects. This is a very cool project and I'm so happy to see they wrote this at the end:<p>> But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.<p>Apparently I run <a href="https://hanami.run" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run</a> an email forwarding service and I also say that<p><a href="https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future</a><p>> 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.<p>Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build <a href="https://pix.fastloop.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://pix.fastloop.xyz</a> where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site.<p>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
This service should come with a big fat warning that the emoji email addresses should never be used for anything remotely serious.<p>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.<p>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 <i>did</i> set up DKIM, did you?). Just to name a few issues.<p>But even if implemented perfectly, there are <i>a lot</i> 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.
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.
> 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.<p>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]<p>It’s really annoying, it’s not part of a spec, it’s just gmail.<p>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.<p>I suspect if author had sent from another account it would work fine.<p>[0] <a href="https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-forwarding-gmail/" rel="nofollow">https://support.dnsimple.com/articles/troubleshooting-email-...</a>
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.
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]!<p>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.<p>1: <a href="https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/" rel="nofollow">https://unicode-table.com/en/130BA/</a><p>2: <a href="https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/" rel="nofollow">https://unicode-table.com/en/130B9/</a>
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.<p>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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-behalf/" rel="nofollow">https://paddle.com/support/how-does-paddle-handle-vat-on-my-...</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sales-of-digital-services-in-the-eu" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/vat-moss-vat-on-sa...</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26293050</a>
This is a great fun project but a risky business idea. Only 13 registrars allow emoji <i>now</i> and one could also say only 13 <i>still</i> allow them. It is well possible that they will stop supporting emoji, like other registrars did in the past.<p>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.
That was freaking awesome.<p>Basically it's a long and technical shaggy dog story. He started with an insane premise (<i>emoji domain name</i> ?!), added enough detail (<i>The night of 150 emojis</i>) to strain even a willing suspension of disbelief yet still without breaking it, and then ended with an anti-climactical (because it <i>is</i> a shaggy dog story even if true) $1440/year ARR.<p>Bravo.
I really enjoyed the rabbit hole and sort of wished you made more money.<p>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.<p>Plus I’m tempted to get one :) I’ll sleep on it though.<p>Good luck!
Why even bother with registering emoji domains?<p>Just allow people to register bob.<emoji>@mailoji.com.<p>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.
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
I thought IETF had banned emoji domain names after the unicode snowman was registered? (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572</a>)
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.<p>Note: In the FAQ it says the price is $5/yr, but it seems to be $9.99 now.
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.
> Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.<p>Appreciate the honesty of a few weeks. The number of great looking projects on HN that mention 'build last weekend' are hard to belief.
I think that I'm missing something.<p>General question:<p>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?)<p>If yes, does anybody have any example? (I'm testing a web-crawler => I would like to test it against such emoji-domains...)
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?
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.
"I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need."<p>Kudos to the author for such a fun project
Fun idea! But It’s too bad that Kazakhstan’s decision to MITM all HTTPS traffic makes this a nonstarter for actual use<p><a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-intercepting-all-https-traffic/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/kazakhstan-government-is-now-i...</a>
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.<p>Then I realize I can have emoji in email itself. So I quickly add emoji support to my email forwarding service: <a href="https://hanami.run" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run</a><p>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.<p>So anyone own an domain here, if you like Emoji email, signed up for <a href="https://hanami.com" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.com</a> and add your domain in there and configure alias.<p>Try email me at `flower-emoji-hacker-doesn't-support-emoji@hanami.run`<p>Check our docs <a href="https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email" rel="nofollow">https://hanami.run/docs/emoji_email</a><p>Long live emoji.
Just be careful with ccTLDs. Read more about the .IO debacle a few years back: <a href="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/" rel="nofollow">https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-...</a><p>Also recently, Notion had issues with their .SO TLD More info here: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-schedule-app-dns-technical" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/12/22280127/notion-down-sche...</a><p>> 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.
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.
I like the idea of having an email dedicated to joke and not serious stuff so I rushed to register one.<p>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 :/
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.
> Mailoji was not a proper business yet, so there was no way I could publish my ad.<p>I always have shelf businesses registered and available for this.<p>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<p>“It’s a tech company”<p>“no, there isn’t a website its 2021 it just uses telegram and wechat to get customers”<p>(remember: the bank doesn't <i>actually</i> care about their anti-money laundering statutes either, they care about you giving them a reason to care, which is very different.)
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].<p>[0]: <a href="https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/" rel="nofollow">https://panic.com/blog/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain</a>
Just wanted to say I enjoyed that story - whimsical little tech project, written up in an entertaining and informative manner.<p>Not that I dislike more serious stories, but nice to have a mix.
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?
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xudongz.com/blog/2017/idn-phishing/</a>
> and yes, most form validations hate them.<p>Big mistake of these forms. Sometimes people are enormously resistant to following the specifications.
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.)
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.<p>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.
ICANN SSAC Advisory on the Use of Emoji in Domain Names<p><a href="https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/sac-095-en.pdf</a><p>A good document outlining many of the issues with using Emoji in domain names.
Just got <a href="http://xn--f18h.fm" rel="nofollow">http://xn--f18h.fm</a> (rolled up newspaper) for <a href="https://newsasfacts.com" rel="nofollow">https://newsasfacts.com</a>. I actually think emoji urls pique people's interest more than traditional urls.
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)<p><a href="https://www.newsy.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsy.co</a>
This was such a fun read. It inspired me to buy <a href="http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/" rel="nofollow">http://xn--vn8hkk.ws/</a><p>Edit 1: TIL Hacker News doesn't support emoji. lol<p>Edit 2: Yeah, I know; that's a cow, not a bull. Don't yuck my yum!
Read the full article and watched your amazing trailer :)
but loved the last line and fully agreed:<p>"But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun."<p>Right on man !!! Applause.<p>Added to personal wish list when I'm not sinking all my money in domain names & startup :).
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 <i>must</i> be successful.<p>So, congrats, OP.
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
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<p>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.
The real scoop is Netflix.soy. Excellent.<p><a href="https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy" rel="nofollow">https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy</a>
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
This promotional video is epic: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKxEXZv4G3c</a>
"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
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
Emoji domains are a lot of fun for sure.<p>Shameless plug: A few years ago I discovered them for the first time and made <a href="https://.to" rel="nofollow">https://.to</a> which listed all available single-emoji domains for the .to extension.<p>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).<p>Edit: okay so HN doesn't like emoji domains – here's a blog post that goes into more detail with the actual URL: <a href="https://marc.io/emoji-domains" rel="nofollow">https://marc.io/emoji-domains</a>
I bought <beer>@<computer>.kz but it doesn't work, the forwarder doesn't have SMTPUTF8 support sadly.<p>The QA engineer in my couldn't not try that one :)
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.<p>Then again, it’s $9.99...
> It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up.<p>And this is why they are "all taken" on all other domains...
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.....
It has emoji domains, but disallows emoji accounts. Weird. I cannot have @.kz.<p>This is probably disrupted by HN. I mean I cannot have [thumbsup]@[thumbsup].kz.
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.
> TLDR; (…) made $1000 in a week<p>> (…)<p>> I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.<p>> (…)<p>> Even though I still haven't made the money back on all the emoji domains I bought<p>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 (<i>especially</i>) in the TLDR?<p>It brought me back to a recent Indie Hackers post[1]:<p>> 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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did-it-take-2-days-2-months-or-2-years-88b91d8e1c" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-made-my-first-20-but-did...</a>