I bought xn--mn8h9e.ws a couple years ago just for fun. I think it's fun to own an emoji domain, but what I can say definitely say is that it's still a bad idea to own one if you want to get emails to it.
Popular thick email clients still struggle with utf8 domains and I've fiddled around with several email providers that just have complete failures trying to send as well.
I tried pasting the email address in a bunch of popular services (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) as my email or the domain as my homepage and most of them treat it as invalid, and I found some legitimate breaking bugs in their services in trying it out.
Edit: case in point, just noticed HN also falls in the camp of unsupported emojis in the text body, so another example :). Added the punycode instead
I discovered emoji .to domains ~7 years ago and put up a site listing all the available ones [1]
Within a few days almost all of them sold and made a couple grand in affiliate commissions.
I wrote about it here: https://marc.io/emoji-domains
Email forwarding is also a clever use! Nice to get that recurring revenue.
I find it a little disingenuous that the author keeps dropping the TLD and describing the emails as cool@<poo>, when the TLD is still part of the email address. Interesting experiment, anyway. I'm surprised that it worked well enough to get a functioning email service working with it. A lot of systems must assume that an email address or domain name wouldn't include emojis.
This sounds like a subplot of a Neal Stephenson story from back in the day.
It would be cool if they took the https://omg.lol approach and let you host a website/page at bob..kz if you purchase bob@.kz
Wait, aren't emojis explicitly prohibited from being used in IDNA? Or do the implementers just not bother to read the "IDNA Rules and Derived Property Values" table and simply allow anything that's a correct punycode?
I bought 40 squeaker balls for my dog, those were also fun.
This was fun.
I feel they missed a truck not calling the service Emailji, which swaps just one syllable.
I'm 3 years late (better late than never I guess) but this was a brilliant read and idea: simple, neat and no bloat. Love it!
>> Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.
I turns out their mailbox.ws domain doesn't have SPF or good DKIM records. Might be part of the problem why google chucks it.
Email is a shit show. I feel like getting emails out reliably is akin to black magic now. Without the right incantations your never going to know what happened or why.
I would not trust Kazakhstan to honor the TLD registrations if this took off and made some noise. Reminds me of Libya taking ownership of all those trendy .ly domains claiming you have to obey Libyan laws and regulations to operate them. Still a fun idea taken quite far!
I thought this was a cool idea so I tried to add a mailbox with an emoji username to my protonmail account - no bueno. Invalid username. Boo!
How does that even work from a legal perspective? Do you have to create a business at some point/file taxes?
This stopped feeling like fun the moment one person can hoard entire country's emoji set of domains... and I feel guilty for hoarding half a dozen of domains...
Does anyone know what happened to TinyProjects? I looked forwards to reading his updates and it looks like he stopped a while ago…
This is really a fun idea and nicely written post
It seems like a great way to fend off spam
This was a fun read.
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Enormous discussion at the time (2021)[0](1683 points, 626 comments)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26422799